How to Negotiate a Deal When Offers Come Through
As of writing this article, our marketplace has over $3 Billion of verified proof of funds and hundreds of buyers waiting to purchase a good deal. To help you sell your profitable asset quicker, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to walk you through our selling process for a seamless deal for all parties.
After you’ve passed our thorough vetting process and your listing is live, what happens next?
Managing Offers
You’ll be receiving inquiries or offers from different buyers in the coming days and months. While buyers do their due diligence during this time, we’re also busy working in the background to make sure your business is seen by the right kind of verified buyers.
When you receive an offer, you have four options:
- Accept and finalize the offer
- Accept and circulate the offer
- Provide a counteroffer
- Reject the submitted offer
Accepting and Finalizing The Offer
When a buyer submits an offer, the seller is notified and you’ll have the chance to review this offer. If it meets your criteria and you’re happy to accept it, you’ll confirm this by clicking “Accept & Finalize Offer”.
Once you finalize, the buyer will be notified and will receive the next instructions for how to begin the payment process.
Accepting and Circulating the Offer
When a buyer submits an offer, the seller is notified and you’ll have the chance to review this offer. If it meets your criteria and you’re happy to accept it but would like to delay finalizing for 24 hours to circulate the offer for potential higher bids, you can click on “Accept & Circulate Offer”.
Interested buyers will be notified that an offer has been accepted and the listing will be open for circulation for 24 hours. During this time, other buyers can make a counter offer that’s at least 10% higher than the initial offer.
Sellers are unable to accept offers during the 24-hour circulation period, and can only decide to accept a counter offer after the circulation period has completed.
Once the circulation period is over, the seller needs to accept an offer and mark it as “final”.
This is a great opportunity to go forward with a deal that works best for the seller depending on the deal structuring of the different options.
Take note that once you’ve made your choice, you won’t be able to change so please make sure to review all the options on the table before proceeding.
After 24 hours passes, the deal is done. All that’s left is for the buyer to wire us the money. Once the funds have arrived in our account, we will help you with migrating the business to the new owner.
On the other hand, if the buyer is interested in buying your listing at the full list price they can click “Buy Now” to instantly buy the business at the listing price and avoid the circulation period.
Once we receive the full list price funds from the buyer, we will then mark your listing as Sold and start our Migrations process.
Rejecting an Offer
If you feel a submitted offer is way below your expectations or threshold, you can turn it down or submit a counter offer.
We recommend that you provide a counteroffer so that you keep as many options open as possible later.
Provide a Counter-Offer
We often see sellers make counter-offers, which are part and parcel of negotiations. A buyer might be testing to see how much wiggle room they have, and they’re usually more willing to meet midway between a first offer and your listing price.
If there’s a potential deal that satisfies both your and the buyer’s requirements, a counteroffer can be put back to the buyer to consider.
You can send a note back to the buyer explaining what sale price you have in mind and suggest a value that’s closer to your expectations.
Removing Too Many Cooks from the Kitchen
In order to not spoil the broth, we want to let you take the reigns as much as possible.
For listings that are less than $300,000, sellers can communicate directly with buyers through messages and arranged calls via our ticketing system. We keep a record of responses in a single thread to keep an audit trail to protect all parties involved.
This way, you can accelerate the deal or slow it down as much as you want.
And don’t worry, we’ve got your back. We’ll monitor the thread and clarify any questions or clear up any confusion that crops up.
It’s important to keep correspondence in this thread; any offer made by a buyer outside of the platform is considered as an informal offer. We’ll only take an offer seriously if it’s done within the platform.
If you’re ready to sell your asset and submit your business with us, click here for a free exit planning call with our team of business analysts who’ve helped thousands of entrepreneurs navigate a profitable exit.
This might be the ticket to your next business opportunity.