How to Prevent Your Deal from Falling Through

Jason Huett
3 days ago
4 min read

Quick Answer

If a buyer backs out late in the process, don’t panic. The best way to protect your outcome is to (1) expect some fallout, (2) qualify buyers more systematically up front, and (3) build a marketing “backup plan” so you can replace a buyer quickly without restarting from scratch.

📌 Key Takeaways

Deal fallout is common: many studies estimate ~50% of deals fall through after an initial offer.
Newer buyers (including many ETA buyers) may be more likely to exit due to overwhelm or mindset shift.
Better marketing and tighter qualification reduce the odds of a deal collapsing.
A “backup” buyer pipeline can shorten recovery time when a buyer walks.

When a Buyer Walks Away: What’s Really Happening?

“Sorry, but we won’t be moving forward with this transaction…”

Unfortunately, when you have your business listed for sale and are walking down the aisle with a buyer towards closing, anything can happen — including, a buyer exiting the deal. This can be emotionally and financially devastating, but it doesn’t need to be.

Real Stats: Over the past 12 months, approximately 20% of the buyers who submitted an LOI (Letter-of-Intent) in our pipeline ended up getting cold feet and leaving a deal (Note: We typically represent sellers). Multiple national studies have found that in the U.S., approximately 50% of business deals fall through after an initial offer has been made.

This is most common with new buyers who become overwhelmed with the process or decide that business ownership isn’t for them. And, with the advent of Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) programs across the U.S., it’s a common challenge because many of these buyers come from corporate America, where they are accustomed to having a comfortable, predictable salary.

If you’re a business owner, you know that entrepreneurship has its ups and downs — the ability to remain flexible is critical to business ownership, but it’s a much different mindset than working in corporate America.

Why Marketing and Strategy Matter

This is why marketing is so critical when selling your business. If you list your business on a site like BizBuySell (or one of the many other platforms where buyers tend to be a bit greener), you will surely encounter this issue.

A mentor once said to me, “Jason, the quality of your leads correlates directly to the quality of your marketing strategy.”

In other words, if you don’t take the time to craft a compelling narrative, research the ideal buyer, and have a bulletproof qualification process in place, you’ll run into this issue frequently.

We spend an incredible amount of time and energy crafting marketing strategies and execution plans to minimize buyers walking away. The time, effort, and energy invested on the front end almost always prevents issues on the back end.

3 Key Components to Attracting Better, More Qualified Buyers

Here are the key components to attracting better, more qualified buyers:

1) Define the ideal buyer persona

A buyer for a local, family-operated restaurant is going to be very different than a buyer for a large, multi-location plumbing business. Sellers often think, “Anyone who has the money is a good buyer…” However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Proof of this targeted approach is evident with just about every major corporation in the U.S. Their marketing departments know exactly:

Who they are targeting
Why the target consumer is buying their products
Their customers' age range
Their customers' income level
Their customers' lines of work (even their Job Titles)
Their customers' geographic locations (e.g. rural v. suburban)

2) Develop your core messaging

Once your target audience has been identified, it’s critical to communicate your business’s value — not based on what you love about your business, but in terms that will be attractive to your potential buyer.

Instead of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would want to be done unto…”), the Platinum Rule is 10X more effective (“Do unto others as they would want to be done unto…”).

3) Build a backup into your marketing plan

As noted above, about 20% of our initial buyers get cold feet. Over the past 12 months, on average, it took us just over three weeks to replace our first buyer with a new buyer.

Building a Back-Up Plan

We plan for the reality that some buyers will get cold feet. Even with strong front-end qualification, there’s always a percentage of deals that will fall through — so, we build a pipeline of backup buyers that allows us to move quickly when this happens.

A good backup plan is built around preparing for everything to go wrong. The best backup plans don't plan for a single failure, but rather, provide backup buyers that can be filled in at a moment's notice. These plans often include the following strategies and tactics:

Maintaining regular, ongoing communication with active buyers.
Having an active database: this means a clean email list with accurate contact information.
Rapidly deployable marketing channels including email, social media, and database marketing to find new buyers quickly.
Having strong inter-personal skills to quickly build rapport — afterall, we do need to identify and lock a new buyer in quickly and that means building trust with buyers quickly.

Table: Where Deals Commonly Break (and How to Reduce the Risk)

Deal Stage	What Can Go Wrong?	Common Reason	Prevention Move
Pre-LOI	Low-quality inquiries	Broad, generic marketing	Tighter buyer personal, strong messaging
LOI	Buyer gets excited, then hesitates	"Shiny object" behavior	Strong buyer qualification process
Due Diligence	Overwhelm, fear, paralysis by analysis	First-time buyer nerves	Due Diligence roadmap & regular meetings
Financing	Changing loan terms	SBA/Bank issues	Create a contingent financing plan
Closing	Pre-purchase buyer's remorse	Risk tolerance mismatch	Have backup marketing plan ready to deploy

In Closing...

A deal falling through can feel like the rug got pulled out from under you, but it’s also a reminder that the best exits are built on preparation, not hope.

If you want to reduce the odds of a buyer walking (and shorten the recovery time if they do), focus on tighter buyer targeting, clearer messaging, and a marketing plan that keeps qualified prospects in motion throughout the process.

To your success,

Jason Huett Business Broker | CEO | CMO

Collaborative Commercial Business Brokers, LLC.

Are you considering selling your Wisconsin business? Get in touch with us to discuss your sale.