How to best market deals on Axial

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How do I get started?

The method of marketing deals on Axial is via a Sellside Project.

Sellside projects help you manage the entire transaction process, from investor research to deal marketing, document management, and funnel tracking. After creating a project, you can initiate conversations with buyside members by sharing a teaser with them.

Your deal information is always confidential. Your teaser will be accessible to only the groups you choose to share an opportunity with.

To create a new project: From the homepage, click Create a New Project.

You will be prompted to select this project’s primary objective, which will be one of these two options:

  1. Sell the business

  2. Obtain financing

If you are interested in both objectives, you’ll need to create a project for each angle to ensure Axial covers all of your marketing goals.

Then, you must provide an internal code name for the project. This is to help you quickly distinguish between projects at a glance. This name is never shown to anyone outside of your firm.

How do I set up my project?

You’ll be prompted to answer questions about the company and its transaction goals. Axial uses this information to generate a teaser and to match you with relevant buyside groups who have expressed an interest in these types of deals based on financial, industry, and location fit. Keep the following tips in mind when writing your company description to maximize interest in your company:

  • Do not use all-caps, exclamation points, hyperbole, or too many adjectives.

  • Ensure the description is professional, as well as truthful and not misleading.

  • Write a detailed description at least 250 words in length, including the following details:

    • How the company generates revenue

    • Year the company was founded

    • General backgrounds of the management team

    • 4-7 “Investment Highlights” that discuss the unique strengths of your company (i.e., market share leader, owns significant intellectual property, 3-year historical revenue growth of 20%+, etc.)

    • Clearly state the goals of the proposed transaction. Prospective buyers will appreciate your being upfront about your goals and your reasoning for wanting to conduct a transaction

For more information on creating strong projects, please visit our blog post 6 tips for writing great M&A investment teasers.

Company Basics

Here, you will give your project an external headline and answer questions so Axial can better recommend buyside members to you.

You will also identify the industries the company operates in with the Add Industries button. Select the relevant industry nodes that best encapsulate the business. You can use the Search feature at the top or the Filter feature on the left to identify appropriate selections.

How do I choose my industry?

After pressing the Add Industries button, you will be taken to a list of over 15,000 specific industries. You can remove certain general industries which you know are not related to your company by using the filters on the left-hand side of the screen. From there, you can open the dropdown menus from what remains in order to find your specific industries. When choosing an industry on the sellside, it must be the penultimate or last level of the industry tree. As you pick industries, they will show up on the right-hand side of the screen.

Financials

In this field, select the month of the company’s fiscal year end, then, input the company’s historical and projected financials. Providing as much historical and forecasted financial figures will increase the amount of interest in your deal.

Your Role

Here you will indicate your relationship to the company, and whether interested parties will be subject to fees should the transaction close.

Documents

This section allows you to select and manage documents related to the opportunity, including:

  • Uploading a custom teaser (which will be shared upon pursuit of the opportunity due to deal confidentiality)

  • Selecting whether you’d like to use the Axial Standard NDA or your own NDA for electronic signature

  • Adding a Confidential Information Memorandum (CIM) and other confidential documents you want to share after the NDA is signed.

Before including Axial Standard NDA with a project, we recommend reviewing the elements of the NDA to ensure you and your team feel comfortable with the coverage it provides. You can view and download a PDF of the Axial Standard NDA via the Deal Information form, or here.

Interested buyside members who receive the Standard NDA will be able to sign it and return it to you digitally. Using the Standard NDA is a great way to save time and move efficiently through the vetting stage of the deal-making process. If you would rather use your own NDA, you may upload one or link to your NDA instead. Custom NDA files are also eligible for electronic signing.

NOTE: Axial’s standard NDA is signed 11.6% more often, and in 23.3% less time, than custom NDAs shared on the network.

While the sellside controls the NDA process, all users have the ability to add attachments to their messages after a deal has been shared – if other NDAs or documents need to be shared, or if edits need to be made.

Once you’ve shared your teaser with recommended buyers or capital providers, you can follow up with your CIM or other summary materials. You can upload multiple documents related to the CIM, or provide a link to your document-sharing location. All CIMs shared via Axial will be watermarked.

What documents can I upload and send via Axial?

When building out a sellside project on Axial, you’re able to upload your own documents (each up to 150MB): a custom teaser, an NDA, and a CIM. Here is the comprehensive list of file types we support:

.dat, .doc, .docm, .docx, .dotx, .gdoc, .odt, .pdf, .pps, .ppsx, .ppt, .pptx, .rtf, .tif, .tiff, .txt, .xls, .xlsx, .zip

How do I send my deal out?

After you finish setting up your sellside project in the Deal Information section, you will have the opportunity to create a message that can be sent to recommended buyside members which Axial intelligently generates for you. This message, along with the information you have provided about your deal, is called a teaser, and will enable the buyside member to decide if they want to pursue this deal further or not.

You can create this message in the Outreach Setup tab, and you can pick a primary member to receive all the messages and notifications about this project. Once you finish writing the message, you may send yourself a test to see what your teaser will look like when buyside members receive it. When you are satisfied, press View Recommended Members to see your matches.

How do I choose who gets to see my deal?

Axial is not a public posting platform, so in order to share your deal, you will have three different sharing options to get your deal to buyside members. These options can be toggled between by pressing the dropdown menu for Sharing Settings at the top right corner of the page.

SmartShare

If you decide to enable SmartShare, Axial will intelligently distribute the deal to maximize its total credible interest. Recipients of the deal include, but are not limited to, Recommended Members or referrals from Contacted Members.

SmartShare will remain enabled if you respond to each pursuit or signed NDA within 7 days. Eligible responses include:

  1. Sending the CIM via Axial

  2. Sending a message via Axial

  3. Updating the status of an Interested Member

Inbound Inquiry

Rather than choose which buyside members you would like to share your deal with from the recommended members, Axial offers you the ability to let the buyside reach out first through Inbound Inquiry.

Recommended Members will receive a notification that they have the opportunity to inquire on the deal. The information presented only pertains to the deal itself and fully protects your anonymity.

They can then choose to either Request Access to the deal, or to Pass on it.

Upon viewing the deal information, those members will then be able to draft and send you custom inquiries, expressing interest and making the case for why they’d like to be included in the process.

If you receive an inquiry, the buyside member who sent it to you will appear at the top of your Interested Members tab. From there, you can choose whether to admit them into the process or not.

Manual Review

From Recommended Members you can click into each row to discover the specifics about each recommended member, their firm, and why you matched. If, after reviewing the firm’s details, you’re ready to share your teaser with them, go to the bottom of the sidebar and click the Contact button. After you share the teaser for the first time, the recipient will then move to the Contacted Members tab and your project’s status will update from Not Shared to In Market. The project’s status will remain In Market as you continue to share more teasers until you otherwise update it.

You can also share the teaser with multiple members at a time (each one will get their own unique message thread). First, check the box next to each firm you’d like to contact. Or, to send to the entire list, click Select All. Next, click the Draft Outreach Note button located at the bottom of the page, and you can create the message you want to send to all these firms.

After you share the teaser with Recommended Members, your deal becomes available anonymously to the rest of the list via Inbound Inquiry and any other future recommendations that match your project as long as it remains “In Market”. If there are any recommendations you’d rather not even see your anonymized deal information, you may also turn off Inbound Inquiry at any time.

Do I need to pay to market deals via Axial?

No, we do not charge a fee to sellside members who market deals via Axial.

However, Axial reserves the right to review and approve any deal prior to its dissemination on the platform. Axial is overwhelmingly best-suited for M&A and growth capital transactions in North America where the business generates in excess of either 5M in sales or 500K of EBITDA / pre-tax profit.

Deal marketing privileges are most frequently withheld because of poor business information, lack of member responsiveness, or irrelevance (i.e., we do not approve pre-revenue startups, mining / mineral asset transactions, etc.). For more information, visit Axial’s Member Code of Conduct.

We encourage members to market all of their relevant deal flow on Axial to qualify for business owner referrals and to earn recognition in Axial's quarterly league table and "Top 50" industry benchmarking reports.

How do I record Deal Status Updates?

As a sellside member, it is your responsibility to keep the status of the deals you are involved with updated. In order to do this, on the Interested Members tab, open the dropdown menu under Status for the deal you would like to update and choose the new status of this deal.

By staying on top of this, sellside members will receive numerous benefits such as gaining a higher chance to appear on Axial’s Top 50 list or Axial’s League Tables. These rankings generate thousands of views, and will allow sellside members to win new business and improve their online brand. Click here to learn more about these awards.

Why am I being asked to submit my deal for review?

For the Axial platform to work at optimum efficiency, sellside opportunities need to be classified as richly and accurately as possible.

Our application relies on the information you provide to generate a list of relevant recommendations: therefore, the better your inputs, the better the recommendations will be leading to better targeting, and ultimately, higher response rates for your outreach. With over 15,000 industry options to choose from, it can sometimes be challenging to find the most relevant industries to classify the business you’re representing. Project headlines and descriptions can be daunting, too: it’s one thing to make them error-free, but another to make them truly excellent.

Luckily, we’re here to help.

When you submit your project, a professional at Axial will review your deal information in-depth, and they may immediately approve it to be shared on the network with the targets you choose, or they may reach out to you with some suggested tweaks.

We want you to have the best possible experience on the network, and the review process is just one more way to help make that happen.

How do I edit an existing project?

Go to your sellside projects and click on the one which you want to navigate. You can navigate to the Project Setup tab where you can further edit this deal. When you switch off of this tab, you will be prompted to save your most recent changes.

What should I do when the deal is no longer in market?

Once a deal is no longer in market for any reason, update the status of the deal. One way to do this is when looking at all of your sellside projects, open the dropdown menu under Status for the deal that is no longer in market. Another way to update the status is to click on the project you want to update, then to press the dropdown menu next to the title of the project, where you will be given the same status options. Here, you can choose one of the reasons below that this deal will no longer be in market.

Successfully Closed: You will be prompted to create a tombstone in order to show this closed transaction, which will then be added to your profile.

Under Exclusive LOI: You will be prompted to say how you sourced the buyside party for this transaction in order to submit this status update.

On Hold or Dead: Changing to this status will archive the deal, which means you can no longer see recommended members but you can still see the contacted and interested members.

What kinds of debt can I raise via Axial?

Axial’s recommendation engine currently supports 17 debt types. If you’re unfamiliar with these, here is some basic info on each:

Senior debt – frequently issued in the form of senior notes or referred to as senior loans, is debt that takes priority over other unsecured or otherwise more “junior” debt owed by the issuer. Senior debt has greater seniority in the issuer’s capital structure than subordinated debt, or junior debt. In the event the issuer goes bankrupt, senior debt theoretically must be repaid before other creditors receive any payment.

  • Asset-based lending

    • Accounts receivable financing & Factoring – a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount. A business will sometimes factor its receivable assets to meet its present and immediate cash needs.

    • Inventory financing & Equipment financing – a business loan secured by inventory or equipment collateral (assets). The loan, or line of credit, is secured by inventory, accounts receivable, and/or other balance-sheet assets. This type of loan is often used to meet various cash flow needs of companies, for example, meeting payroll or building inventory.

  • Secured debt – a type of debt backed or secured by collateral or specific assets which can be sold in order to reduce the risk associated with lending.

  • Unsecured debt – a type of debt that is not backed by an underlying asset, and thus is less risky than secured debt for the lender, but also comes with typically higher interest rates.

  • Cash-flow financing – a type of debt backed by a company’s expected cash flows, often used by companies seeking to fund their operations, acquire another company, or make another major purchase. This allows companies to obtain financing today as opposed to some point in the future.

  • Project financing – a loan structure for long-term infrastructure, industrial projects, and public services that primarily relies on the project’s cash flow for repayment. The project’s assets, rights, and interests can be held as secondary collateral.

  • Term loans – a loan for a specific amount that has a specified repayment schedule and either a fixed or floating interest rate. An established small business with sound financial statements and the ability to make a substantial down payment to minimize payment amounts might find this an attractive option.

  • Revolver loans – a loan with a specified term that allows the borrower to draw down, repay, and re-draw loans on the available funds during the term of the loan, unlike a term loan.

  • Small Business Administration loans – business loans guaranteed to banks and lenders by the Small Business Administration which alleviates the risks for lenders.

Subordinated Debt – (or junior debt) debt which ranks after other debts if a company falls into liquidation or bankruptcy. It ranks below: the liquidator, government tax authorities, and senior debt holders in the hierarchy of creditors. Debt instruments with the lowest seniority are known as subordinated debt instruments. Because subordinated debts are only repayable after other debts have been paid, they are more risky for the lender of the money. The debts may be secured or unsecured. Subordinated loans typically have a lower credit rating, and, therefore, a higher yield than senior debt.

  • Mezzanine Debt – is the middle layer of capital that falls between secured senior debt and equity. This type of capital is usually not secured by assets, and is lent strictly based on a company’s ability to repay the debt from free cash flow.

  • Secured Debt – Refer to section in Senior Debt.

  • Unsecured Debt – Refer to section in Senior Debt.

Convertible debt – a fixed-income debt security that pays interest payments but can be converted into a predetermined number of common stock or equity shares. These are a flexible financing option for companies which offers investors a type of hybrid security, with the features of a bond such as interest payments while also having the opportunity of owning the stock itself.

Unitranche Debt – a type of debt that combines senior and subordinated debt into one debt instrument; it is usually used to facilitate a leveraged buyout. The borrower would pay one interest rate to one lender, and the rate would usually fall between the rate for senior debt and subordinated notes.

Venture Debt – debt financing provided to venture-backed companies by specialized banks or non-bank lenders that can complement equity financing.

Why are there not more Recommended Members for me to send my deal to?

The Recommended Members list is populated with members that Axial’s matching algorithm thinks is best suited for your deal based on their criteria. The most common reasons Axial isn’t recommending more members to reach out to are:

  1. The deal has already been shared with all currently relevant buyers

  2. The deal is pre-revenue or less than ~$5M in revenue

  3. The company is not profitable or has a low EBITDA

  4. The company is not based in North America

  5. The deal is for project financing with no current revenue or EBITDA

  6. The deal is a real estate project or asset, and therefore not an operating company