A sale process finds the hard questions too late
A sell side advisory team was preparing a regional telecom asset for market and was drafting the vendor materials. Those materials are built by the seller and its advisers, working from what they already know about the asset. They are thorough about everything the seller has thought about.
The questions that slow a process down are the ones nobody prepared for, and they arrive when a bidder is already in the room and the timetable is public. By then the work has to be done under bidder pressure. Getting to them in advance meant asking people who had sat on the buy side of comparable assets, while the materials were still in draft and could still be changed.
We put the asset to buyers before launch
We assembled a panel of former corporate development leads and operating principals who had acquired assets of this type, alongside debt and structuring specialists, and put the asset’s profile to them. Each of them had sat on the other side of a process like this one. The brief was simple. What would you want to see first, and what would make you pause?
Panellists were sourced against acquisition experience in comparable assets rather than sector seniority. Somebody who has run a process from the buy side asks different questions from somebody who only knows the sector. The asset was described by profile and never by name, and anyone who might plausibly bid was screened out before scheduling. Every expert cleared our compliance framework.
The vendor pack answered the questions actually coming
Several of the panel’s opening questions had no answer anywhere in the draft materials. Each of them could be answered with work the team could do before launch, rather than under pressure with a bidder waiting. It also changed the sequence: knowing which questions move a price told the team what to lead with and what could wait for a later phase.
The firm’s sell side advisory practice adopted the step. A buyer panel before launch is now standard there where the buyer universe is unfamiliar, because running one costs very little against a process that stalls.
