How to find Acquisition Targets

Working on the buyside of a deal involves being able to segment markets and identify targets.  In order to do this effectively, it is important to identify as many of the companies that meet your defined target market and then eliminate those that do not meet the criteria.  This is where it is crucial to have deep market knowledge and expertise.

In the flash demo below, I have segmented the UK SAP market to briefly demostrate how I go about target acquisition searches.

In order to capture several criteria, there are duplications of companies which I have tagged as D and companies which are not suitable targets which are tagged as E.  You can interact with the flash demo below to move these in and out of the dataset.

I can sort and search on different aspects of their skill sets and this enables me to very rapidly create short lists of targets on which to focus, eliminating those which do not meet my search criteria.

Another aspect of searching is to have keen regard to geographical location.  For this I use the company’s post code (See field PC1) which enables me in my software application to map the targets.  This can be done for any country in the world where you have the postcode or zip code.

If you would like to know more about target identification and selection please contact me at jbdcolley[at]aol[dot]com or leave a comment on this blog for me.  If you like this please RT.

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