How to Gain a Competitive Advantage as a Buyer – For Free
Updated on June 17, 2021
Getting ahead in business is usually tied to some kind of investment. It’s encouraged to get an expensive MBA or invest in top-dollar services to grow your business. But what if we told you that some of the best strategies for advancing in business were free?
If you are a hungry buyer ready to seize your digital asset, we’re letting you in on a few tactics you can employ—all for free—on our marketplace that many other buyers overlook. Their miss is your gain as these quick, easy strategies will allow you to close on deals faster and get the most out of deal negotiations.
Ready to outpace the competition without any upfront investment? Read on to discover how to be an unbeatable buyer.
Registering for an Account
The first and most important step to getting anything rolling on our marketplace is to register your account.
When you register your account, you open up the full suite of useful buyer tools that minimize the actual time it takes to do your due diligence. You’ll also get access to downloadable resources to help you on your buying journey.
With this out of the way, you’re ahead of buyers merely looking around at businesses who aren’t taking the steps to fully utilize what the marketplace offers. As a registered buyer, you can get serious about the buying process and take real action on deals. The best part is, it only takes a minute and it costs absolutely no money.
As an extra bonus, once registered you can also stay in the know with email updates and platform notifications.
Registering your account is the first step to getting your deal started and leads to the next key step—unlocking your listing. To help you unlock your listing, you have another free competitive advantage at your disposal, which we’ll get into next.
Verifying Liquidity
Having your liquidity verified is the gatekeeper between you and your new business, and it’s completely free to do.
When you verify your liquidity—or send in proof of funds, you show that you have enough money to buy businesses with us at a certain price. This is how you unlock a listing; this one small step can put miles between you and other interested buyers on a fast-moving deal.
All you have to do is take a few steps to verify your identity and then demonstrate your funds by uploading various documents:
- Bank account statement
- Stock portfolio
- CPA letter
- Home equity line of credit (HELOC)
- Other Available Credit Status Information
Once uploaded, we verify the documents within a day and then issue a VIP code with 10 uses to easily unlock listings. Begin here to verify your liquidity.
With a simple upload, you’ve essentially proven your worth and can cut to the front of the line of potential buyers. You’ll be able to jump right into due diligence on up to 10 businesses.
It’s also worth noting you aren’t limited by the 10 uses of the VIP code. If you reach out to us, we are happy to set you up with more codes to unlock listings during your buying search.
Uploading documents you already have lays the foundation to unlock businesses in your price range. While other buyers have to scramble to pull together their verifications, you can put down offers.
Using Filtering
You’ll outpace other buyers by utilizing filtering.
When you use the filter function, the marketplace generates the perfect deals for you within minutes. Once you enter your criteria, the marketplace even sends businesses that match your criteria directly to your inbox for you to keep an eye on.
We’ve created a full guide on how to use filters so you can leverage this powerful tool.
The reason filtering gives you a competitive advantage is it cuts your search time and brings you right to the deals you really want to see. Not every buyer is savvy enough to know they don’t need to scour the marketplace for deals. With the right deal delivered to you, you’re already getting into your due diligence while others are still searching.
Filtering is totally free and is one of the best hacks our marketplace offers.
Listening to Seller Interviews
Want to get a sneak peek of a business and its seller without unlocking a listing?
Seller interviews give you a taste of what a business is like without having to jump on a call with the seller. You can go through as many as you like, take notes on what stands out to you, and use them to inform your decision of which businesses to unlock.
A sampling of the business and what the seller is like is available, so there’s nothing stopping you from getting a free look at a business.
These free interviews also help endear you to the seller (and broker) because you’ll show up informed to the buyer–seller calls, prepared to ask good questions, which they love. With all the background information on the business and seller, you can use this insight to build out your negotiation strategy. Not to mention, being a preferred buyer in the pool means you can have a better rapport for negotiation and can build out your best deal structure.
It all starts with taking advantage of the information right at your fingertips. For all our recent interviews, take a look at the Real Money. Real Business. podcast page.
Being Coachable
One of the most invaluable pieces of advice we can give is to listen.
To listen means to stay open, whether that be to good advice from our business analysts in a deal negotiation or to the motives of the seller, it is important to remain open to opportunities.
We call this openness “being coachable.” Coachability is often overlooked, but it can’t be understated how important it is for getting the most out of your deal.
For example, being open to the advice of our business analysts can get you far. This is because they’ve been in countless deals and seen enough scenarios to be able to coach you through your specific deal. They’re ultimately there to keep everyone’s best interests in mind, so being coachable through the process means you’re leaning on expert advice and will walk away with the best deal possible.
Being coachable means you’re also acting on some of our best insight, which is to listen to what the seller wants. If you anchor your negotiations in what the seller’s “why” is in their deal (i.e., to sell quickly or get as much cash upfront as possible) you’ll be able to search for wins for them that give you leverage to negotiate wins for yourself.
If you listen and stay coachable, you’ll be unstoppable against other buyers who refuse to do the same. You’ll surge ahead of the competition with this simple, cost-free tactic.
The Best Things in Business are Free
If you’ve gotten this far, you are now armed with five advantages over other buyers that have an impact and cost $0.
They’re easy to implement, with many taking just a few minute’s effort. For every buyer who says they don’t have a few minutes to implement these tactics, you have one less buyer to consider as your competitor.
If you’re ready to lead the pack, get started by registering your account so that you can begin to unlock listings. Our business analysts are here to coach you, so if you’re open to designing your best deal, call our team.
