By Brett Kaufman. 8 years using relationships to build sales pipelines, from political fundraising to a 7 figure business to running matchmaking for two communities. Over 1,000 introductions facilitated.

When a listing hits, call the buyers who fit the deal, have shown you funds, have closed before, answer within a day, and have talked to you recently. Fit and funds decide who is eligible. Track record and responsiveness decide the order. Recency tells you whether what you know about them is still true.

Here is the moment. The engagement letter is signed, the seller wants confidentiality, and you have a database of a few hundred buyers who all said they were interested in something like this. You will make maybe ten real calls before the teaser goes out wide. Those ten decide how fast this deal moves.

I have never run a listing. But I have made over 1,000 introductions, and the question is the same one I face every time someone asks me who they should meet. Who fits, who is real, who shows up, and is what I know about them still true. Here is how I would sort the list.

Why the first calls carry the listing

Your own database is often where the buyer already is. Gregory Kovsky of IBA, writing on best practices for finding a buyer, says that historically 20 to 25 percent of IBA’s listings have been bought by members of its buyer database. He also flags the risk on the other side: marketing directly to strategic buyers can leak confidential information to a competitor, supplier or customer.

So the first call list is two jobs at once. Find the buyer who can close, and protect the seller while you do it. Both reward calling fewer, better buyers first.

Gate one: fit

Start with the buyers whose criteria actually match. Michael Fekkes of ENLIGN Business Brokers, writing for the IBBA on what defines a serious business buyer, describes a serious buyer as one with a detailed and concise investment criteria: type of business, industry, geography, size and price. He adds that the optimal situation is a buyer with direct industry experience.

I think about it the way I think about matchmaking: the person who can say what they want in one sentence is the person you can place. A buyer who says “commercial HVAC, Texas, $1.5M EBITDA and up” either fits your listing or does not. A buyer who says “open to anything profitable” fits everything, which means they are not a first call on anything.

Gate two: funds you have seen

Fit without funding is a conversation, not a buyer. Fekkes points to a lender prequalification letter in hand and a current personal financial statement. Jim Parker, writing for Business Brokerage Press on selecting serious buyers, puts it plainly: before any real progress can be made, you need to know whether the buyer has the means to buy a business.

The buyers I would put at the top already sent you that proof on an earlier deal. You are not asking for it today. You already have it, dated.

Ranking: track record

Among buyers who fit and can fund, the next sort is what they have done. Have they closed a deal with you? Did they honor the last LOI they signed, or retrade it? Did they walk away cleanly when diligence turned something up?

Broker software is moving the same direction. In an IBBA piece on the integrated deal platform, Peter Conroy describes his firm’s matching software that ranks buyers by deal criteria, acquisition history and prior engagement, surfacing who to call first and why. Prior engagement is the part only you can see. Your notes on how a buyer behaved last time are the ranking.

Ranking: responsiveness

A buyer who takes four days to reply to a teaser will take four days to reply to a diligence request. Parker’s line is direct: a buyer who does not respond relatively quickly to emails and calls is a very bad sign, and a serious buyer will not let days pass before getting back to you.

PrivSource, describing the buyer side of the same pattern in its guide to broker deal flow, says a broker keeps 200 or more buyers on a list and sends new listings to the 20 who reply fast. Fekkes names the habit to look for: a serious buyer knows a quick no is far better than a slow no. The buyer who passed on your last teaser in a day, with a reason, is a better first call than the one who never answered at all.

If you want the view from the other chair, how to get on a business broker’s first call list covers what buyers do to earn this spot.

The check that gets skipped: recency

Everything above is a snapshot. Fit, funds, track record and responsiveness are all true as of the last time you talked. The question is when that was.

A buyer’s profile goes stale quietly:

• They closed a deal in the spring and are digesting it, not buying.
• Their lender letter expired, or their ceiling went up.
• Their investor walked, or a new one committed.
• Their criteria narrowed from “services” to one niche.
• They stopped searching and nobody told you.

A buyer you spoke to last month is a known quantity. A buyer you last spoke to eight months ago is a guess with a good file. That is not a reason to skip them. What I tell people: know which is which before you dial, so the first call to an old name is a two minute check, not a confidential pitch.

This is why the buyers who stay in touch with you between listings tend to get the call, the same dynamic covered in recency beats reputation in deal origination. You trust what is current.

A first call list, written down

My rule of thumb is to run the five checks on paper before you pick up the phone. As illustrative examples:

• Buyer A. Fits exactly. Lender letter on file from June. Closed one deal with you. Replied to your last teaser in hours. Talked two weeks ago. Call first.
• Buyer B. Fits exactly. Strong proof of funds. Never closed with you, but passed fast and clean twice. Talked in July. Call second, and confirm criteria.
• Buyer C. Best track record on your list. Fits on paper. Last contact eleven months ago. Call third, as a check in, before you share anything.
• Buyer D. Fits loosely, no funding on file, slow to answer. Goes on the wide teaser, not the first calls.

The hard part is not the ranking. It is that the inputs live in your head, your inbox and a database field nobody updated.

Where this breaks

With 30 buyers, you remember. With 400 across a dozen sectors, you do not. I hit the same wall with introductions. Past a certain number of people, memory stops being a system. You cannot recall which buyer you last talked to in March, who posted last week that they closed a platform deal, or who you promised a call and never made. Intermediaries run long cycles and short memories for exactly this reason: the list you build from memory in the first 48 hours is the list that sees the deal.

Sorting by tag helps you find who fits. Tagging contacts around the questions you actually get asked gets you most of the way on fit. Recency is the column that never stays current on its own.

Ten minutes a day

That is why I built FRONT OF MIND. It keeps that column current. It opens on your 10 minutes for today, the buyers to text, each with one line saying why today. A strong buyer going cold. One who posted that they closed a deal, shown only when the post is confirmed to belong to them. A follow up you said you would send. A pipeline deal quiet for seven days.

When a listing lands, ask Liala out loud “who do I know that buys HVAC in Texas” and get the right buyers with why, including when you last spoke. Every draft is a text style message, 40 words max, nothing sends without your tap, and it learns from your edits so the check in sounds like you. Your contacts are encrypted. No one on our team looks at them, and you can export or delete anytime.

Start free with your first 25 contacts and see which buyer comes up first.

See how it works