Before Negotiating, Ask This One Question
Last time, we talked about generating enough ideas for who could potentially buy your business, so that you have real options to choose from.
Because the reality is, if you have no ideas, you are stuck. You cannot move forward with, “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re out of ideas.”
So once you have those ideas, the next step is deciding what to do with them.
The first thing you need is a set of criteria to evaluate those potential buyers.
When you are thinking about who might acquire your business, there are a few straightforward questions to ask:
Do they have the financial capacity to buy it?
Have they ever acquired a company before?
Will you need to teach them how to go through the acquisition process, in addition to explaining your business?
But the most important question is simpler:
Do you think they actually want to?
The challenge is that asking that question directly will not always give you the best answer.
So instead, when we work with clients, we help them approach it differently.
We encourage them to think through, and then find a way to ask, a more powerful question:
What could we accomplish together that we cannot do alone?
This shifts the conversation.
Instead of asking a yes-or-no question, you are asking something that requires thought. You are inviting the other party to imagine what working together could look like.
That is where real conversations begin.
This is also how you begin a negotiation in a way that allows you to guide the direction of the discussion.
Once you have your list of potential buyers, and once you have evaluated them against your criteria, the next step is to develop a tailored story for each one.
That story should be designed to spark interest, to make them think, and to open the door to a deeper conversation.
At that point, you are no longer asking whether they want to buy your business.
You are creating the conditions for them to start thinking that it might be worth exploring what a deal could look like, whether that is a full acquisition, a partial sale, or even a joint venture.
That is how you move from ideas to real opportunities.