Lead generation for M&A advisory firms
Meetings with the owners of companies you want to take to market.
Done-for-you cold email for sell-side advisers, business brokers and buy-side teams. We find the owners worth a conversation, write to them discreetly under your name, and book the first meeting. You pay per qualified meeting that shows up.
Pay per qualified meeting that shows up. No retainer.
Who you’ll meet
The buyers we book you in front of.
Founder-owners
Owners of privately held businesses in the revenue or EBITDA band you work in, in sectors you know. The person who would sign the engagement letter.
Family and second-generation owners
Businesses where the next generation isn't taking over, and the owner needs someone to lay out the options before choosing one.
Private equity and corporate development
For buy-side mandates and deal sourcing: partners at funds and heads of corporate development at acquirers in your sectors.
Targeting
How we build the list.
Company size set by your mandate floor — revenue, an EBITDA proxy or headcount — not whatever a data vendor calls mid-market.
Sectors where you have transactions to point to, so the first line of the email is credible.
Private, founder- or family-controlled ownership. Subsidiaries and businesses already backed by a fund are excluded unless you want them.
Signals that make the conversation timely: years in business, founder tenure, consolidation in the sector, competitors recently acquired.
Geography you can serve in person, if your process depends on it.
The emails
What the outreach leads with.
- 01
A market read, not a pitch
Owners reply to a specific observation about their sector — who has been buying, what acquirers are paying attention to — far more readily than to a request for a meeting.
- 02
Options, not a sale
Most owners are years from a decision. The email offers a confidential conversation about how their business would look to a buyer, which is a much smaller ask than “are you selling?”
- 03
Discretion, stated plainly
Nothing in the email implies the company is for sale, and it goes to the owner and nobody else.
Every email goes out under your name, and you approve every line before anything sends.
Qualified meetings
What counts as a qualified meeting.
We write the definition with you before a single email goes out. For M&A advisory firms it usually looks like this:
The attendee owns, or controls a majority of, the business.
The business is inside your agreed size band and sectors.
It is privately held and, as far as the conversation shows, not already engaged with another adviser.
The meeting is a real conversation about their options, not a data request or a courtesy call.
A meeting that doesn’t match isn’t billable. More on writing qualified meeting criteria.
Why pay per meeting
Why it suits M&A advisory firms.
A single mandate can be worth more than a year of any outbound budget, and the gap between a first meeting and a signed engagement is long. That makes a monthly retainer an awkward fit: you'd be paying for months before knowing whether any of it worked.
Paying per meeting puts the cost where the value is. You pay when an owner who meets your criteria has sat down with you, and not for the months of list building and follow-up it took to get there.
See how it works or compare pay per meeting vs retainer.
Pay per meeting
How you pay
- Monthly tech fee
Covers the tech, at cost
Sending domains, inboxes and the software your campaigns run on. It pays for infrastructure, not for our time, and it is the only fixed cost there is.
- Per qualified meeting
The only thing we earn
One fee per meeting, agreed before we start. It is the whole of our upside, which is why our incentive and yours point the same way.
A meeting is billable only when all three are true
Qualified. It matches the buyer criteria we write down together before a single email goes out.
Booked. It is on your calendar, at a time they chose, confirmed.
Showed up. They attended. A booking that no-shows is our problem, not your invoice.
You never pay for
- Our time
- No-shows
- Unqualified meetings
- A month where nothing books
The detail — including how the fee is agreed — is on pay-per-meeting pricing.
M&A advisory lead generation, answered.
Not when it's done properly. The emails are short, specific and written for one person, they come from you, and they never suggest a company is for sale. Anyone who asks not to be contacted isn't contacted again, and you approve every line before anything sends.
They're different lists with different messages, so they run as separate campaigns with separate criteria. Most firms start with whichever side their pipeline needs most.
Yes. The model is the same: we agree the size band and the kind of owner you want to meet, and you pay for meetings with owners who fit it.
We do, built around your sectors and your track record, and you approve them before anything is sent. They go out under your name from domains we set up for the purpose, so your firm's main domain is never used.
We book qualified sales meetings.You only pay for the ones that show up.