Welcome back to Becoming a Better Business Broker in 30 Days!
This concise series title describes exactly what we hope you get out it - becoming a broker that can close more deals with less work.
After yesterday's 1,900 essay, Becoming a Better Business Broker Day 9: Different Financing Options For Business Sales, our fingers needed a break 😴 so we kept today's topic, Utilizing Technology & Tools, short and sweet.
Let's dive in.
The Business Broker 'Tech Stack'
If you have no idea what the term 'Tech Stack' means, don't worry - you're not alone (we had to Google it). Translating the nerd-speak, a tech stack is simply a list of different technologies/software you use to operate the various departments of your business.
For some businesses, such as custom manufacturing, tech stacks can get very complex. While other businesses require little-to-no technology - such as a lemonade stand.
Whether you like it or not, in today’s world every business is affected by technology and this is only being accelerated by AI. But don't worry, here at DealBuilder we're strong supporters of technology as it is key to our mantra of helping brokers close more deals with less work. Even better? for the average brokerage - they only need to implement the following technologies and tools to be 99% more efficient than the average broker:
1) Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the backbone of any thriving brokerage, acting as the digital Rolodex for managing your client interactions, deals, and data, all in one place.
For business brokers, a CRM helps streamline the entire sales process, from lead generation to closing, ensuring every client interaction is tracked, every opportunity is capitalized on, and no detail falls through the cracks.
Business brokers face a weird problem when it comes to CRMs. Not only are our sales cycles long (seller prospect → closed deal) but the set-up for a CRM in our industry is weird.
Our deals don't fit into the neat boxes that many CRMs were originally designed for. The intricate dance of negotiations, due diligence, and relationship-building requires a tool as adaptable and nuanced as the business brokers themselves.
Our recommended choice? Deal Studio*
Looking to learn more about CRMs? Check out our full blog, Top 5 CRMs for Business Brokers.
Technology Recommendation: Deal Studio
*psst Deal Studio clients are eligible for a 50% discount to DealBuilder - learn more here 👀
2) Email Management
The best free email service provider - Gmail. Why? Other than it being free, it's simple to use, and more importantly, it is easy to configure a custom email domain.
What does that mean? It means sending your emails from morgan@examplebrokerage.com and not examplebrokerage@hotmail.com - this makes you look 10x professional from something that takes a couple of minutes to do (the best part is that you only have to do it once).
Are you currently buried in emails as it is? If yes, we could not recommend Superhuman enough. This is an email software that trains you to respond, delete, and follow up to emails with 10x speed - we're a happy user currently saving hours every day.
Technology Recommendation: Gmail + Superhuman
3) Valuations
As we covered in Day 3, setting a realistic asking price is a vital step in filtering your sell-side clients.
While your Excel template might work great - the process is slow for market-based valuations. First, you have to enter all the data, then you look up all the comparable transactions, then do MORE data entry (yuck). Don't even get us started if you want to try and make a fancy-looking valuation report after.
DealBuilder eliminates this challenge by integrating DealStats comparable transactions directly within DealBuilder, allowing you to quickly build Most Probable Selling Price (MPSP) reports in minutes (check out a demo here).
Technology Recommendation: DealBuilder
4) CIM/CBR Creation + Sharing
If we told you we could eliminate 90% of CBR/CIM writing from your workflow, would you push back retirement 5 or 10 years? 👀
Let’s be honest - not many people love writing CIMs (for those that do, we don’t judge), but CIM writing is necessary to close a deal. As we mentioned earlier in this article, everything we do at DealBuilder is helping brokers close more deals with less work - so CIM automation felt like a natural fit.
Here’s how we do it:
- Using AI technology we scan your client's website + ask dynamic onboarding questions (completed by you or the client directly) to retrieve all the information we need to build the CIM.
- Complete the onboarding process by entering the company financials + uploading any supplementary attachments you want to be included in the presentation.
- Once you hit ‘Go’ you can watch our AI system write both your Listing Page (confidential) and CBR/CIM
- Review and make any final edits from our editor and then hit ‘Publish’ allowing you to share your deal with buyers and on the DealBuilder Marketplace (optional).
You can learn more about our CIM automation tool here.
Technology Recommendation: DealBuilder (yes, we're biased)
5) Phone System
If you're still using a landline in 2024 - congratulations for making it this long. Here's the thing, this hasn't been necessary for a while now.
"But what about my office number? I don't want to list my personal number on my website!"
Neither do we (and we don't). How do we avoid this? By using digital tools like DialPad where you can configure your cellphone to have a Main Office line and then individual phone lines for as little as $35/month per user.
Even better, DialPad now has an AI note-taker built right into the app, allowing you to review a quick summary of your call with accuracy. Side effect: this will hold you accountable for all the ‘I will get you this by the end of the day’ promises you make.
Technology Recommendation: DialPad
6) Deal Marketing
Okay, we've got our leads logged in our CRM, the valuation is set, and our CIM is ready to get in front of... oh yeah we need buyers to send our deal to.
In addition to marketing on BizBuySell and the DealBuilder Marketplace - you may want to conduct some proprietary email marketing.
You can do this easily with Apollo.io allowing you to quickly build email lists of buyers from the same industry as your client. Taking it a step further, by leveraging AI, Apollo will actually help you write your email - who said AI was bad? 😂
The best part is that Apollo doesn't break the bank either - starting FREE and then allowing solo brokers to benefit from as little as $49/month.
Technology Recommendation: Apollo.io
7) Data Rooms
Just like Dalmatians, there are a 101 virtual data rooms out there. These are secure file-sharing systems that allow you to upload, organize, and set sharing permissions with buyers, sellers, accountants, and lawyers in due diligence.
When it comes to VDRs for Main Street brokers - keep it simple. We've had great success using OneHub in the past and would recommend it as a robust data room tool that won't bust the bank.
But stay tuned, DealBuilder is launching its data room this Summer 2024 (okay, okay, we've already said too much 👀 ).
Technology Recommendation: OneHub*
*Follow us on LinkedIn to get notified when the DealBuilder Data Room is released!
Conclusion: Building Your Business Broker Tech Stack
As we wrap up Day 10 in Becoming a Better Business Broker, let's do a quick recap of our recommended tech stack that will allow you to take deals from A to Z:
- CRM - Deal Studio
- Email Management - Gmail + Superhuman
- Valuations - DealBuilder
- CIM/CBR Creation - DealBuilder
- Phone System - DialPad
- Deal Marketing - Apollo.io
- Data Rooms - OneHub
The current landscape of technology is overwhelming, we hope today's article helped reduce your analysis paralysis allowing you can get back to closing more deals.
Join us (surprise) again tomorrow for another edition of this series, Marketing Strategies for Listings.
If you want to learn more about automating your business brokerage with DealBuilder, please visit our site or book a demo here.
