If you’re ready to sell your business, then you likely have achieved great success within your industry. To run a successful business, you must understand all the ins-and-outs of your business and industry. From competitors and customers to adjacent products and services, you understand how to do business within your industry.

This expertise is a key element of running your business, but it can create several blind spots during a sale process.

You surely have connections within your industry. You know your competitors and possibly have a network that spans into adjacent industries or sectors. This knowledge causes temptation during the selling process as you might be consider selling your business to a company within your market. Limiting the list of potential buyers can lead to the sale of your business to a buyer that doesn’t offer a strong value.

Before this happens, you should discuss with an M&A advisor how other industries may view your company in the marketplace. Even better would be an M&A professional with experience selling companies in several different industries.

An industry-agnostic M&A professional can weigh in on how the rest of the buyer universe may value your business. The right M&A advisor will understand how to position your business to several buyer types. M&A professionals who have closed transactions in multiple different industries can identify strategies to position your business to buyers outside of your industry in a way that insiders often can’t.