You Cannot Sell a Secret

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AUTHOR

Bruce Coudrey

Like everything there is a cast to properly Marketing a Business for sale

When a business is for sale, the market needs to know about it. Otherwise, it remains a secret. And you can’t sell a secret.

To reach the widest audience, it’s generally accepted nowadays, the most effective medium is the Internet. Whilst it’s cost effective, there is still a cost.

Vendor-paid advertising of a business for sale is no different to that of selling a residential home. This concept has been adopted by the real estate industry in selling homes for many years.

Individual sellers of businesses would find it very difficult to advertise themselves through major websites for the period of time required to sell the business. In fact, an individual seller could only market their business for a certain amount of time before the listing expired or a request to upgrade the listing was made. And that means paying more money.

In most cases vendor-paid marketing to Benchmark will remain in place until one of two things happens:

The business is sold, or
The seller terminates the listing.

The benefit to a business owner of marketing their business through a reputable brokerage is that the business can be advertised on many major websites. Sellers also gain the benefit of their broker using the internal data base to find suitable buyers. Benchmark has a database of well over 20,000 buyers.

Included in the marketing fee is the ongoing administration to ensure the listing is reposted to maintain a high ranking, updating Information Memoranda & Executive Summaries.

We live in a user pay world and you can get what you pay for. In most cases we find that the marketing fee is less than 1% of the listed sale price. And all marketing fees are tax deductible.

It takes four elements to sell a business.