Your last transaction should help you win your next one

Corporate finance teams spend months working on transactions.

There are meetings, negotiations, difficult conversations, valuation discussions, due diligence, unexpected problems and, eventually, completion.

Then marketing gets involved.

A photograph is taken. The logos are assembled. A short announcement appears on LinkedIn: "We are delighted to have advised X on its sale to Y. Congratulations to everyone involved."

That is often the end of it.

There is nothing wrong with announcing a completed transaction. Deals are important credentials. For many corporate finance teams, though, some of the best material is disappearing inside fairly predictable deal announcements.

A transaction can do much more than demonstrate that your team is busy. Used well, it can demonstrate expertise, build an adviser's reputation in a sector and start the conversations that lead to the next transaction.

Why would anyone outside the deal care?

That is the first question worth asking, and it is where the interesting content usually begins.

Perhaps the transaction demonstrates increasing consolidation within a particular market. Maybe international buyers are showing greater interest in Irish or UK businesses in the sector. Perhaps the company had characteristics that made it particularly attractive. There may have been lessons around preparing a business for sale. The adviser may have a view on what the transaction tells us about valuations, buyer appetite or the future of that market.

The content stops being "we completed a deal" and becomes "here is something useful we learned from completing this deal."

That is far more valuable to the next business owner considering a transaction.

Start with the next client you want

There is a simple way to improve deal content. Before writing anything, ask who you would like this transaction to put you in front of next.

Imagine a corporate finance team has just advised on the sale of a successful technology services business. If the team wants more work from technology entrepreneurs, the content should help another technology business owner recognise the team's relevant experience.

That does not mean turning the transaction into an advertisement. It means drawing out the parts of the story that are useful to somebody facing similar decisions.

What made the business attractive? What should owners be thinking about several years before a sale? What characteristics are buyers currently looking for? Where do transactions become difficult? What can management teams do in advance?

Those are more interesting questions than asking for a quote congratulating the client.

How many pieces of content can one deal produce?

More than most firms use. Treating each transaction as a single marketing event is the common mistake.

The initial announcement establishes the credential. An adviser post can explain why the transaction was interesting. A short article can look at the broader sector trend. A client interview, where appropriate, can explore the owner's experience of preparing for and completing the transaction. A later post might address a specific issue that arose during the process.

The transaction can also become a case study, a presentation example, a newsletter item or a talking point at an industry event.

None of this requires manufacturing content. The expertise already exists. The marketing job is to extract it.

What should you ask the deal team?

One reason deal announcements become repetitive is that advisers are asked to "send marketing a few lines about the deal." For somebody who has just spent weeks completing a transaction, that is not an appealing request.

Specific questions produce better material.

What made this business particularly attractive? Was there anything unusual about the buyer landscape? What surprised you during the process? What does this transaction tell us about the sector? What should other owners in this industry be thinking about now? What did the management team do particularly well in preparing? What could other businesses learn from it?

Ten minutes answering good questions gives a marketing team considerably more than asking an adviser to write an article from scratch.

How do you handle confidentiality?

Corporate finance content comes with real constraints. Some transactions cannot be discussed beyond the agreed announcement. Certain information will be commercially sensitive. Clients may not want details of the process made public.

That does not make useful content impossible. It makes clear boundaries essential.

What has already been made public? What has the client approved? What can the adviser discuss at a sector level without revealing anything confidential?

Sometimes the most useful content requires no additional information about the client at all. An adviser can use the transaction as the prompt for a broader observation about the market. That can be enough.

Put the adviser into the story

The team needs visibility, and so does the individual adviser. This matters particularly in corporate finance, where clients are choosing people and their judgement rather than a process.

A company page announcing a deal is useful. An adviser explaining why the deal matters is considerably more powerful. It demonstrates how they think. It gives clients and referrers a reason to engage. Over time it associates that individual with particular types of transactions and particular sectors.

This should not become self congratulatory. The strongest adviser content is generous. It gives the reader an observation, an idea or a piece of information they did not have before.

Think beyond LinkedIn

Deal storytelling should not be restricted to social media. A well developed transaction story can support website credentials, sector pages, pitch documents, introductions from referrers, conference presentations, email communication, media commentary, awards submissions, future proposals and business development conversations.

Marketing investment becomes far more efficient when the same underlying expertise supports several commercial activities.

Build a simple process

The easiest way to improve deal storytelling is to make it routine.

When a significant transaction is approaching completion, marketing should know about it. Agree what can be communicated. Spend ten or fifteen minutes with the lead adviser using a standard set of questions. Identify the main commercial angle. Produce the announcement. Then decide whether one or two additional pieces are worth developing.

Not every transaction needs a campaign. Some genuinely warrant nothing more than a short announcement. Strategically important transactions deserve more thought.

What good deal content actually looks like

Likes are not the most important measure. The better question is whether your deal content helps the market understand what you do, who you do it for and where your expertise is strongest.

If somebody running a business in a sector you want to develop sees your transaction and thinks "they understand companies like mine", the content has done something useful.

A completed transaction is evidence of what your advisers can do. Used properly, it can also help create the conversation that leads to the next one.