Evaluating sell-side M&A advisors has some striking similarities to how baseball players get evaluated. 

In baseball, coaches, scouts and analysts use dozens of metrics to evaluate batters, fielders, and pitchers. No single metric can tell the whole story of a player, but the overall picture tends to come into focus as you dive into all metrics and compare them with one another.

Just as baseball has Batting Average, RBIs, Slugging Percentage, Strikeouts, Walks, and Hits, sell-side M&A advisory can be analyzed through the lens of Client Quality, Process Efficacy, Bids per Deal, Speed to Close, Price Differential, and Close Rate.

When you’re a business owner looking to exit your company or a private equity firm hiring a bank to sell a portfolio company, you can benefit immensely from having access to these metrics.

Over the course of 2023, Axial will be surfacing this emerging data as a way to help business owners find and hire great M&A advisors, and also to recognize outperformance in the world of lower middle market sell-side M&A advisory. 

In this piece, Axial focuses on surfacing the 20 M&A advisors with the highest close rates in 2022. “Close Rate” is defined as the percentage of successfully closed deals brought to market by a particular sell-side advisory firm over a specific period of time.

Axial’s rankings were assembled based on the dealmaking activities of 1,435 sell-side M&A advisors. The following methodology was used to generate the list:  

• Bringing a minimum of 5 deals to market via the Axial platform after January 1, 2021 
• Reporting a minimum of 1 closure in 2022 on the deals marketed after January 1, 2021

Congratulations to the featured M&A advisors for their achievements in 2022.

2022 Closed Deal Data from the Axial Platform

Top 20 Advisors by Close Rate

Axial is the trusted deal platform serving the lower middle market ($5-$250M TEV).

Over 3,500 advisory firms and 2,000 corporate and financial buyers have joined Axial to efficiently connect with relevant capital partners, source actionable deals, and build new relationships.

Visit the Member Closed Deals page to see selected transactions that have been sourced and closed via Axial.

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