I'm in the process of listing my business for sale and the brokerage keeps pushing their featured placement package. It's a few hundred dollars for 30 days as a 'premium' listing. I'm skeptical. Has anyone actually paid for this kind of thing and seen a measurable difference in qualified buyer inquiries? Or is it just extra margin for the broker?
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Paying for featured ad placement: Does it work?
Paid for it once on a smaller marketplace. Got more clicks but most were just curious tire-kickers. The serious buyers were already setting alerts for my category.
I wouldn't pay for featured placement on a general business-for-sale site. The conversion from featured to actual offer is terrible. If you have a niche marketplace specific to your industry, it might be different, but even then I'd ask for traffic data first.
The broker's argument is that featured gets you on the homepage and in their weekly email blast. I don't know what the open rate are on those emails though.
Ask them for the open rate and click-tHrough rate. If they hesitate, that tells you something. A reputable platform should have those numbers.
Honestly, a lot of these featured packages are just upsells. I've sold two businesses and never paid for premium placement. What moved the needle was having clean books and being responsive to inquiries within a day.
Agree with the reply above. Responsiveness matters more than how shiny your listing is. Buyers ghost when they wait 4 days for an answer.
The weekly email blast thing can be decent if the list is real buyers, but I've seen brokers count 'subscribers' that are just other brokers and tire kickers.
I did pay for it. It generated maybe five extra inquiries over a month. One got to a second call. None made an offer. Not worth a few hundred dollars in my case, but my industry is nrrow and maybe the platform isn't a fit.
Did the seller pay the broker a commission on top of the ad fee?
Yep. The listing fee was separate. That's part of why I resented the upsell.
If you're selling a business with real size like 500k cash flow and up, your buyers are already watching the market. They don't need to see a featured badge to find you.
Appreciate the responses. I'm leaning toward declining the package and putting that money toward professional photography and a better one-page summary for buyers. The broker won't like it but that seems like a better use of funds.
That's a better call. Good photos and a clear P&L are worth more than a badge on a listing site.
One more thing, if the brokerage owns the platform where the featured ad appears, that's a conflict. They're getting margin on both sides. I'd ask directly who owns the site.