Why would you ever play defense?
If you are a high-quality seller with great records, you should be very proud of what you accomplished and what you are offering to the buyer.
The ideal strategy is to bring a very positive, forthcoming approach to the due diligence stage.
This stage is not a stage to be dreaded at all.
It is an opportunity to showcase all of the value attributes of your company.
This is another example of where your representative makes all the difference in the world.
If you have a passive broker that sits on his or her butt, you are missing an opportunity and actually heading in the wrong direction.
You do not want an order taker that passively accepts requests from the buyer and passes them on to your internal team. Under that model they do not add any value at all and the buyer is certainly not impressed.
What you want is a strong M&A advisor that collaborates with the buyer to determine what the buyer really needs to see. Then your advisor reviews every request and effectively communicates the well-defined requests to your internal team.
Then the advisor evaluates every bit of diligence response materials for completeness, correctness and appropriateness for release. Lastly, they format all the data as well as index all of the information to align with the buyer's diligence requests.
A strong advisor also maintained a full data tracking matrix with primary responsibility designation, review responsibility designation, due dates and follow up responsibilities for any missed due dates.
This establishes a “cadence” and clearly assigns responsibilities for this process.
You could call it being on offense or you could call it being EFFECTIVE.
The more that you and your advisor maintain control of the more likely that you will have a favorable outcome!