What is your current marketing strategy? How do you ensure your customers and potential customers are aware of your business and enticed to work with you? Without effective marketing, your business will never reach its full value. If you are planning to exit your business, a solid marketing strategy can vastly improve your multiple.

The Impact of a Solid Marketing Strategy

For an owner looking to sell their business, a marketing strategy might be the last thing on their mind. They are busy building structural business value and mitigating risks in other areas of their business. Marketing is not their main focus. However, Heather shares, “Leading up to a sale or exit it is critical to build value and prove that the business can run without the owner. Creating a marketing strategy that attracts new prospects and aids the sales team in closing new business is crucial. Many businesses have thrived on the owner’s reputation and network but cannot support long-term growth without that owner. It is also very common for the business to need to diversify revenue and/or create sources of reliable recurring revenue prior to a sale. We help the business reach these goals through marketing and branding strategies.”

A solid marketing strategy helps a business build sustainable value, regardless of the owner. Heather continues, “By implementing processes to increase brand awareness, generate leads and sales, and help diversify and create recurring revenue, we can strongly influence the multiple. Buyers will see a self-sustaining business with strong growth potential even after the owner is no longer involved.”

Why Educate CEPAs About Marketing Efforts?

Successful marketing campaigns foster deeper connections between businesses and their customers and prospects. Heather says, “Most exit planners are great at identifying areas where their clients need to make improvements to get the value they want out of their business. The exit planner tells the business owner they need a marketing strategy that increases awareness, creates sales funnels, and changes their sales strategy, but what that plan actually looks like and who creates it isn’t always clear.”

Without educating professional advisors on the impact of a strong and cohesive marketing strategy, they will not know what to look for in a marketing campaign to build value before a sale. Heather states that not all marketing firms understand the nuances of marketing for a business that will be transitioned soon. Heather shares, “A typical marketing firm might look at strategies that leverage the owner’s reputation, that sell more products and services to a small existing client-base, or that create a dramatic immediate increase in sales that is not sustainable over time. All things that can be detrimental to the sale of the business.”

Contact Mike to learn more about exit planning!