How Buyers Actually Decide Which Deals to Engage With

A corporate development VP at a mid-market strategic receives about 15 inbound teasers a week. That is roughly 60 a month, or more than 700 a year.

She closes two deals annually.

That math tells you almost everything you need to know about how buyers make decisions. They are not evaluating deals. They are filtering them out.

Most advisors assume buyers read teasers carefully, assess strategic fit, and then decide whether to engage. That is not how it works. Buyers are making fast judgments based on pattern recognition, internal priorities they will never share, and whether the timing happens to line up with something already happening inside their organization.

Understanding how buyers actually triage deal flow changes how you should think about outreach.

The First 30 Seconds

Buyers do not read teasers the way advisors think they do. They scan for immediate disqualifiers.

Wrong geography. Too small. Too large. Wrong business model. Already reviewed something similar and passed. Does not align with the mandate that was just approved by the board.

Any one of those and the teaser is filed away or deleted.

This happens quickly. A buyer can rule out a deal in the time it takes to scroll through the first page. They are not being careless. They are being efficient. There are other teasers in the inbox and several live processes that actually matter.

The deals that survive this first cut are not necessarily better. They are just not obviously wrong. That is a much lower bar than most advisors realize.

What kills deals at this stage is not quality. It is the absence of an immediate, obvious reason to keep reading. If the buyer has to work to figure out why the deal might be interesting, they will not. They assume it is not.

The Internal Context You Cannot See

Even when a deal makes it past the initial scan, it hits a second filter that is invisible from the outside. Does this fit what we are focused on right now?

Corporate development teams operate under shifting mandates. One quarter it is geographic expansion. The next it is acquiring a specific capability. Sometimes it is nothing at all because they are still integrating prior acquisitions and leadership has paused new activity.

You will not learn this from a website or a LinkedIn profile. A buyer may list three strategic priorities publicly, but internally two of them may already be deprioritized because the market shifted or an executive left.

Private equity has similar dynamics, driven by fund economics. A fund can look active on paper but have little capacity to pursue new platforms. They may still take meetings. They may even issue an LOI. But unless the deal fits cleanly into an existing portfolio, it is unlikely to close.

Buyers rarely explain this context when they pass. You will hear phrases like “not the right fit” or “focused on other priorities.” What they mean is that the deal does not align with internal decisions made months ago that you could not see.

The Comparison Set Problem

Buyers do not evaluate your deal in isolation. They compare it to everything else they have seen recently.

If they reviewed a similar company last quarter and passed because margins were weak, they will scrutinize margins in every comparable deal that follows. If they passed on a company due to customer concentration, they will look for that same issue again, even if it is not actually present.

This is pattern matching, not analysis.

The reverse is also true. If a buyer just closed a deal in a subsector and it is performing well, they are predisposed to like similar opportunities. They already understand the market. They trust the thesis. A follow-on deal is easier to justify internally than something entirely new.

You cannot know which pattern you are being matched against. The buyer does, and it shapes their reaction before they finish reading the teaser.

Why Speed of Response Matters More Than You Think

When a buyer responds within 24 hours, it usually means the deal arrived at exactly the right moment. They were already thinking about the space. They need to show momentum internally. Or they just lost a competitive process and need an alternative quickly.

Fast responses are often about timing and internal pressure, not just deal quality.

Slow responses are different. A buyer who replies two weeks later likely had to align internally, confirm capacity, and decide whether they could realistically run another process. When they respond, it is because they think it might actually work.

Most deals get neither response. They get silence. Not because the buyer made a deliberate decision to pass, but because engaging would require effort and there was no clear reason to spend that effort today.

This is also why many buyer lists look strong on paper but fail to generate engagement. We break that down in more detail here → Why Buyer Lists Fail More Often Than Deals Do.

The Unspoken Triage Questions

There are questions buyers ask that have nothing to do with the asset itself.

Do I trust this advisor? Buyers give more attention to people they have worked with before. Cold outreach raises the bar immediately.

Is this going to be a clean process? Buyers can sense complexity. Language that suggests unusual structures or unclear seller motivation triggers skepticism.

How competitive will this be? Some buyers avoid deals that feel overly shopped. Others lean in because competition signals quality. Either way, the perception matters.

Will the seller actually close? Buyers have been burned by processes run to test valuation or appease a board member. If the teaser hints that the seller may not be serious, they move on.

These questions are answered in the first read. They determine whether the buyer keeps going or deletes the email.

What This Means for Outreach

Buyers are not waiting for great deals to show up. They are managing constant inbound noise and trying to identify which small fraction deserves attention.

Your outreach is competing with internal projects, live transactions, and the natural tendency to avoid unnecessary work. If it is not immediately clear why this deal matters to this buyer right now, it gets filtered out.

That is not a judgment on the deal. It is simply how triage works.

Understanding this should change how you build buyer lists, how you write teasers, and how you think about who is actually likely to respond. Buyers who engage are not always the perfect fits. Buyers who pass are not always wrong. They are operating with constraints and priorities that never show up in a database.

If you want to understand how some of these invisible signals can be surfaced earlier in the process, see → AI Deal Sourcing: How It Works.