#11 | Sales Experience is a Big Advantage when Buying a Business

I just keep pulling more golden nuggets out of this study that I referenced in last week’s newsletter.  

Search Investment Group 2023 Self-Funded Search Study 

One of the topics they looked at was the background of the searchers and whether they were successful or not in acquiring a business.  

Here is the biggest takeaway.  

The process of buying a business is a process of selling yourself to the current owner of the business.  You need to sell yourself as the best person to take care of their baby, the business they worked hard to build.  

You can see this in the data:

This table shows the percentage of searchers by background and then the percentage who successfully acquired a business by background.  

What you will see is that people with a Sales and Marketing background represented 33% of successful acquirers, but only 27% of all searchers in the study.  

In other words, those with sales and marketing backgrounds were more likely to close a deal than everyone else in the study.  

Now that I think about it, it makes a lot of sense.  The search process is kind of like a marketing funnel where you are trying to build a process to find leads and then you need to qualify those leads in due diligence and ultimately close the sale.  This is not a process that your average accountant is used to.  

I thought this table and data was interesting and thought you might find it helpful to see where you stack up to other searchers based on your background.  

For those of you who are looking to buy a business, I am curious, what is your background / professional experience?