What should I invest in?

I hear this almost on a weekly basis when I am talking to business brokers. They say that they are looking to get more leads and listings but don’t know what marketing channel or company they should go with.

If you have been thinking this, I will be happy to point you in the right direction. My company, ClientsIO that specialized in lead generation for business brokers, has spent over $3 Million dollars in marketing in the business broker space generating leads for hundreds of brokers per year. We have tried every method there is to generate a quality lead. Here are the top 3 marketing channels for business brokers and how should approach each one.

Cold Email Marketing

Back in 2022, this was my expertise. I was known as the “cold email guy” and I built ClientsIO on the back of cold email marketing. Back then, you could create an email campaign, send about 1,000 emails a day and generate more than enough leads every single month. Nowadays, these types of results simply cannot be accomplished. Around Thanksgiving time of 2022, I saw a huge algorithm update with Google which lowered my open rates and response rates substantially. After years of testing and trying every angle out there, I can to the realization that the market had shifted and cold email marketing will never be the same.

Now, if a broker were to ask me what I think about cold email marketing, I would still recommend it. Why? Well, it really depends on how much time and energy you are looking to put into it. Overall, my recommendation is the following.

Based on everything I have seen, here are the steps on how you can utilize cold email marketing.

  1. Buy a list of business owner data. I suggest Apollo.io
  2. Buy 10 burner domains that are similar to your companies domain.
  3. Create 2 email accounts on each domain. Yes that’s all.
  4. You will need to clean the data that you purchased using any online cleaning software.
  5. Warm up the email campaigns. Some cold email softwares can do this for you. I suggest signing up for Smartlead.
  6. Once you have given everything a couple weeks, I recommend only sending up to 40-50 sends a day per email account. So that means if you have 2 email accounts per domain and 10 domains, that’s around 1,000 send per day. I would not try to increase over this number.

This is the best strategy for cold email. I do not recommend trying to scale cold email. Once you start scaling to 2,000 or 5,000 sends per day, you are likely to start burning domains quickly and sabotage any long-term strategy. Keep it around 1,000 sends per day and you should be fine.

For more insights, check out Best Places To Buy Business Owner Data As a Business Broker.

Cold Calling

One of the oldest tried and true methods to get leads is cold calling. I have offered cold calling services to many business brokers and ran many successful campaigns for them. Yes, cold calling can work but it is getting harder and harder to get great results. Why?

Mobile phones numbers are a prized treasure when it comes to cold calling. When you buy a list of business owner phone numbers, you will most likely get the corporate number or office number. It is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to call the front desk of a company and weasel your way into speaking with the owner. Again, not impossible… but when cold calling, most of your callers time is spent getting wrong numbers, voicemails or gatekeepers.

When I talk to a lot of business brokers, they tell me how they are able to find callers for super cheap that can call all day for them. They think that if the caller is calling all day, that HAVE TO get appointments, right?

After having a call team call over 100,000 businesses for business brokers. Here is the reality…

Let’s say you hire an overseas caller to call 8 hours per day. Here are the stats:

  • In 8 hours the caller should be able to call at least 150 businesses.
  • Contact Rate: 10-15%
  • Missed Call/Voicemail Rate: 85%
  • Business owners talked to: 10-12
  • Gatekeepers/Others: 5-7

Overall, in a full day of calling, the caller was ONLY able to actually talk to 10-12 business owners.

Now do you know the percentage of business owners that are generally thinking about selling their business?

Figures show that around 20% of business owners think about selling their business. This figure is the total number and not how many are actively looking to sell.

At the end of the day, if you want to book 3-5 appointments per month with business owners looking to sell their business within the next 2-3 years, cold calling can work for you. If you are looking to scale your business or do more than 5 deals a year, I do not recommend investing in cold calling.

LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn is a great platform to connect with Business owners in your target market. I recommend every business broker create a strategy to utilize LinkedIn. The biggest thing to note about LinkedIn is that the platform has set parameters in place to limit your outreach. This means that you can only do so much on the platform. It is not a scaleable marketing channel.

To maximize your LinkedIn outreach strategy, I would do the following:

  1. Make sure to get Sales Navigator. This will allow you to build lists of business owners to prospect through.
  2. Please utilize LinkedIn automation. It will make a world of difference. Trying to prospect manually on LinkedIn is a lot of effort for little payoff. The automation platforms can be set up in a way to make it look very realistic your behaviors. I recommend Dripify. It’s the best and most inexpensive option to automate your LinkedIn outreach.
  3. Post industry tips on LinkedIn at least once a week. It will help make you an authority in the space for your network.

Paid Advertising

The last marketing channel I would recommend is paid advertising. There are two different paid Advertising channels many business brokers use. Google ads and Facebook ads. I’ve tested both and here are the results I have seen.

Google Advertising:

  • Great to target specific keywords and only pay when your ads are clicked on.
  • Lead quality is mediocre because you have no control over who is submitting their info through the ads.
  • Scalability is not very high because your ads ONLY show when someone searches the keyword. If there are low searches for a keyword, you won’t get many hits.

Overall: I do recommend running Google ads to branded keywords like your companies name, your name or for keywords such as, “sell my business [city]” and other related keywords.

Facebook Advertising:

  • Best for scalability. Your ads will show to all the business owners within a geographical region.
  • You can also filter by business revenue. For example, if the business owner says they are doing less than $500k in revenue, you have the option of disqualifying them before they are able to submit the form. This one option in Facebook’s form has saved my clients tons of headache of getting junk leads.
  • Facebook will spend your money no matter what. This means you should probably know what you are doing before launching a campaign. My team can help you with this.

My Overall Opinion:

Each marketing channel has their pros and cons. If you have the marketing budget, I recommend dabbling in all of the marketing channels and see what works best for your local market. Many business brokers think that marketing is a one-size-fits-all but that’s really not the case. Depending on how big your market is and how saturated it is will help determine which channel you should use.

For example, if you are in a large metropolitan area, old school tactics like drop letters and direct mail may not work the best. If you are in rural areas, I recommend these older tactics because these markets are not being advertised as heavily to.

If ClientsIO were to recommend one marketing channel that delivers the most consistent lead flow month after month, we’d suggest Facebook ads. The leads are high quality, and the consistency of lead flow is unmatched compared to other marketing channels we’ve tested.