Market Your Business – How to Secure Your Confidentiality and Give the client the Information He Needs
If, after learning the basics with your company, a prospect is usually interested in buying your business, they might begin to respond with inquiries and requests for more precise information.
This creates a difficulty: The prospect has a legitimate requirement for details about your business, and you have the best need to ensure sensitive information will not get into the wrong hands.
Look at all the prospects anyone talks to about your business; merely one will buy it. Nevertheless, all the other prospects will possess the knowledge you distributed. You can’t have the funds to have confidential information, for instance, customer lists, recipes, or maybe other trade secrets getting into the wrong hands.
Therefore managing the disclosure details about your business and creating judgments along the way as to whether prospects deserve your time and attention are essential keys to selling your business successfully.
Here are a few things you can do to identify the best potential customers and provide them with just enough info to move them through the purchasing process.
Ask The Buyer To transmit Their Questions And Demands For More Details In Writing.
To protect your confidentiality, We strongly suggest you inform the buyer to put his requests/questions in writing. Doing it this way:
• Allows you to think through your replies more thoroughly before reacting
• Prevents you from pouring too much information off the best of your head
• Indicates you won’t get interrupted at the wrong time – think about if five buyers possess your selling memorandum ever called you at your workplace whenever they thought of a new issue.
• Puts all your conversation in writing, so there is much less chance of misunderstandings – you can refer back to what you wrote instead of trying to keep in mind what you said days or even weeks ago.
• Will save you time – specific queries will come up repeatedly. By putting your answers on paper, you will have a pre-written response prepared whenever a second or 3rd prospect asks the same issue.
So, keep the preliminary communication after the Selling Nota confined to e-mail: it’s fast, confidential, and allows you time to think through your responses carefully.
Continue To Qualify The Buyer Through the entire Process.
Another benefit of requesting prospects to submit their queries in writing is that it offers another opportunity to qualify the individual.
A professional will understand your request and gladly get close to it. Many buyer prospects now own, or have owned, a profitable business and know the importance of discretion.
An unprofessional prospect will often resist this ask and pout about the “inconvenience.” Also, the weak customer will often submit poorly prepared or unclear requests/questions. Even when you did some qualifying when you sent the prospect your Providing Memorandum, continue to observe the client:
**When they communicate with you, is it obvious they have considered the time to prepare their issues and comments, or could it seem like they are flying by the seat of their pants?
**Do they respect your time, including your need for confidentiality, or do these cards call or show up unannounced?
**If they take a problem with your price, recast fiscal statements or other regions of your offering, do they generate a reasonable case for their resistance, or are they just reef fishing for a lowball value
Eventually, you will accept a new Letter Of Intent from just one buyer and go into an exclusive negotiation. At that point (and during Due Diligence), you must reveal all the details and strategies about your business. If you can’t observe yourself making this kind of dedication to a particular buyer as compared, there is no need to go any further: cut them loose today!
Balance The Buyer’s Dependence on Information With Your Need For Secrecy
Sometimes you will get requests for facts from an excellent buying prospective client that you just can’t fulfill. Like after he receives your current Selling Memorandum, the buyer may request to see a list of your visitors or suppliers.
You must decide why the buyer wants this specific, precise information. Will he want to steal your visitors from you? Or perhaps (and a lot more likely) the buyer wants to determine if you are overly dependent on one customer. If 80% of your respective revenues come from just one or two clientele, that is a legitimate red flag that will concern any buyer.
However, your prospect doesn’t need a complete list of your customers in addition to contact information to find this out there. Instead, you can prepare a review that shows what portion of your revenues comes from every customer (or the top 15 or 20 customers if that is more appropriate).
So, any time a buyer requests the category of information, don’t flatly refuse. Instead, try to obtain the buyer’s specific have to have or concerns and then give just enough information to satisfy that.
In addition to the names and info of your customers and companies, information that should be off-restricted until a buyer signals a Letter Of Motive should include all proprietary facts regarding your manufacturing processes, programs, recipes, and product diagrams.
Take into account: Only one of your prospects finds themselves buying your business. But other prospects will still hold whatever information you give these individuals after they drop out.
So a superb question to ask yourself if deciding whether or not to provide several information to a prospect is definitely:
If this person does not obtain my business, could each use this information to harm my very own company’s value or the achievements of the new owner? Should a buyer insists you provide a particular piece of details that you are uncomfortable providing, you will have three choices:
1 . ) You can flatly say “no” and risk losing the dog as a prospect.
2 . ) You can give him the information he asked for
a. ) You can prepare a review that provides just the information you are comfortable revealing and expect it will satisfy the buyer’s needs.
How you handle a predicament like this will depend on the quality of the candidate who makes the request. You ought to rank all your prospects by their qualifications and desirability – Which prospect do you wish to take over your business? You may provide that prospect with much more in-depth information than the buyer at the bottom of your list.
But what you may decide, make sure that the buyer is aware of you are not trying to hide something. There is certain information you are uncomfortable releasing now, yet once the buyer provides submitted a Letter Regarding Intent, he will have full access to your business.
Read also: Company Relationships: What We Can Study From Charities