We're a small shop (2-person deal team) focused on acquiring founder/family-owned B2B U.S. manufacturers with $3M+ EBITDA. Just closed our first deal and trying to accelerate proprietary deal flow rather than relying on bankers/brokers and buyside search firms.
We're thinking about hiring someone in-house to own the outbound process...helping to build target lists by subvertical, managing a direct mail and call cadence to business owners, qualifying conversations, and feeding intel back to the deal team. Essentially replacing what a buyside search firm does but with more consistency and institutional knowledge/credibility with business owners over time.
For those who've done this or seen it done well, what does the right person actually look like? We've been thinking about hungry junior finance types, SDR/BDR people who want to move into PE, and even vendor salespeople who already call on manufacturing owners. Curious what's worked and what hasn't.
To be honest, you're describing a sourcing playbook from 10 years ago. Outbound for small manufacturing / services companies was a little more novel then but has now grown pretty commoditized with new holdcos, search funds, PE-backed strategics in every vertical, etc. Most owners I talk to at this size range get 10-20 inbounds a week. Outsourcing to a sales rep type just puts you somewhere in that pile.
You may not like this rec, but the best way for you to break through the noise is to do most of this work yourself. Your shop doesn't have any brand to speak of, and the only reason for somebody to take your call over the others is because your personal story, experience, boutique approach, etc. resonates with them personally. Being involved from the first touch is the best way to make sure that message hits.
If you're set on hiring somebody, I would keep them focused on "behind the scenes" work (list building, sending emails under your name, pipeline management). I'm personally a believer that this person should be a junior generalist finance person (i.e. who has non-BD responsibilities) as a lot of the sales lifers you describe just aren't smart enough to approach folks with the level of credibility you want.
Very much appreciate the candid feedback. For more color, our direct outbound process is built around our operating partners who have experience in specific verticals, so we create an outreach deck on that vertical (about us, our thesis on the vertical, what a transaction could look like...customized a bit for each target) and write a custom letter under the operating partner's name that we FedEx together, followed up with custom email under the operating partner's name and calls from the deal team. This has produced the best yield of anything we've tried, but the 2 of us don't have the bandwidth to do this consistently at high volume while balancing live deal and portco work.
Our thinking was a junior person could almost exclusively focus on this, and since we've found phone calls following up on the package are particularly necessary (especially for old school manufacturing business owners), that drove my thinking to get someone with some BD experience. Candidly I'm probably not the smoothest cold caller, so was hoping for an upgrade ha.
Hey where are you based - have some aligned experience sourcing potentially interested
NYC
Could you PM me?
I’m based in NYC - would be happy to explore this opportunity if you would like to PM me
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