What Buyers Want from Bankers and Founders

Every buyer has a shortlist of two to three targets built on company strategy, M&A priorities, and a clear hypothesis about what value creation looks like 24 months out.  And every inbound deal (whether a banker teaser, a board member referral, or a founder cold reach) has an infinitesimally small chance of getting on that list. Yet, most sell-side pitches are written as if the buyer has no shortlist at all.

The research to pitch a specific buyer does not require non-public information. It requires paying attention to what the buyer has already made public. Most sellers skip that step entirely.

Andrew Morbitzer has seen both sides of that gap. He ran corp dev at Intuit and GoDaddy for 20+ years, led more than $2 billion in acquisitions, spent time on the sell side as an M&A advisor, and came back to the buy side. In this episode, he explains what buyers need from the sell side, why most pitches miss it, and what changes when they don't.

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What You'll Learn:

• Why inbound deals almost never land on a buyer's shortlist
• How to research a buyer's strategy and priorities using only public information
• What a buyer reads in a teaser that tells them whether the seller has done the work
• Why banker incentives and buyer incentives point in opposite directions
• How to present projections that get taken seriously 
• What Andrew looks for in a banker before recommending one to a founder
• How to build trust faster before anyone opens a data room

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If you're advising on deals and want a framework for how buyers actually evaluate fit, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has Buyer-Led M&A™ frameworks to help you pitch into the buyer's strategy instead of handing them a data sheet.