Most first-time searchers think they can close a deal by reviewing a handful of listings a week, signing the occasional NDA, and waiting for the right one to surface. The numbers say otherwise, by orders of magnitude.
Athena Simpson, founder of AcquiMatch, walked through the actual funnel math on stage recently. Her data, drawn from searchers running structured acquisition processes, lays out what it actually takes to land one signed LOI. It's a useful gut-check for anyone deciding whether their current pace of activity has any chance of producing a close.
The short version: to close one deal, you should expect to scan roughly 28,000 listings, carry 1,300 matched deals through your pipeline, sign 650 NDAs, and review 291 CIMs in depth. Of those, around 81 will warrant a serious review, 9 to 14 will warrant an LOI, and 2 to 3 will be accepted. Out of those, you'll probably close one.
The Funnel
The acquisition funnel
Volume required to land 1 closed deal
Read top-to-bottom, every stage compresses the universe by roughly an order of magnitude. That's because the SMB market itself is full of mismatches, not because searchers are bad at filtering. Wrong industry, wrong size, wrong geography, owner-dependent, declining revenue, unrealistic ask. Most listings are a no for one of those reasons before you ever sign an NDA.
The implication is uncomfortable for most searchers. A couple of NDAs a week is hobby pace. The volume required to land one close is closer to a part-time job than an afternoon habit, and the searchers who treat it as a job are the ones who close.
Decoding Each Stage
Each layer of the funnel hides its own conversion problem. Worth pulling them apart.
28,000 Deals Scanned
This is the top of the funnel: every listing you look at, even if only for ten seconds. Scanning means seeing the headline, the asking price, and the basic financials and making a fast call: does this match my buy box at all? At a sustainable pace of 200 to 300 scans a week, 28,000 takes about two years. That's why most searchers underestimate it. They're reading "scan" as "deeply review" and assuming the number is wrong. The number is right; scanning is headline-level triage at scale.
1,300 Matched Deals in Pipeline
These are the listings that pass the first filter: right size, right industry, right geography, financials worth a closer look. Roughly 4 to 5% of what you scan should make it here. If your hit rate is much lower, your sourcing channels are misaligned with your buy box. If it's much higher, you're being too generous and you'll waste cycles deeper in the funnel.
650 NDAs Signed
About half of your matched deals will be interesting enough to sign an NDA and ask for the CIM. The other half will fall out on a second look (staleness, vague financials, broker responsiveness, or a price that's clearly not in the zone). Signing 650 NDAs across a typical 18 to 24 month search means roughly 7 to 9 NDAs a week, every week. Most searchers don't come close.
291 CIMs Reviewed
Of your NDAs, fewer than half will produce a CIM that's worth a real review. The rest will be too thin, too inflated, or so generic they tell you nothing. 291 CIMs in 18 months is roughly 16 a month, a real time commitment. This is the layer where having a fast, repeatable CIM-review workflow makes the difference between staying in the search and burning out.
81 Deals Seriously Reviewed
Serious review means running the numbers, calling the broker for follow-up questions, modeling SBA debt service, checking customer concentration, and pressure-testing the SDE. Roughly 1 in 4 CIMs justifies this level of attention. 81 deep reviews means building real pricing intuition across your buy box. This is where most searchers actually become good at evaluating businesses.
9 to 14 LOIs Submitted
About 1 in 6 to 1 in 9 deeply-reviewed deals justifies an LOI. Submitting fewer than this usually means one of two things: you're not finding enough deals that work, or you're gun-shy on price. Both are fixable, but only if you can see the funnel clearly enough to diagnose which one is happening.
2 to 3 LOIs Accepted
Of every LOI you submit, roughly 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 will be accepted. The other LOIs lose to a higher bid, a better-positioned buyer, or a seller who decides not to sell after all. Then due diligence kills some percentage of the accepted LOIs. The funnel ends with one close. Sometimes zero.
Why Most Searchers Quietly Fail This Math
The most common search-failure pattern is volume, not bad analysis or bad luck. A searcher commits 5 to 10 hours a week, signs 1 to 2 NDAs in a good week, reviews a handful of CIMs a month, and submits an LOI every couple of months when something looks promising. At that pace, the funnel says they should expect to close a deal sometime in the next 4 to 6 years. Most quit before then.
The searchers who actually close are running roughly 10x that volume. They've built a system, not a willpower routine. The scanning happens automatically. The pipeline tracking is centralized. The NDA and outreach templates are pre-built. The CIM review process is repeatable and fast. The follow-up cadence runs on rails. They've taken the things that consume time at the top of the funnel and removed them from the manual path.
Where the System Compresses the Funnel
The reason searchers without a system get stuck is that the math assumes a level of throughput that's only reachable with tooling. Some specific places where automation absorbs the load:
- Sourcing. Manually checking BizBuySell, BizQuest, BusinessesForSale, and 350+ broker sites every day is unworkable. Aggregated, deduplicated, buy-box-filtered inbound is the only way to get to 200+ scans a week without burning out.
- Pipeline tracking. Once you've got 1,300 matched deals in motion across 18 months, memory is not a system. Status, broker, last touch, NDA state, CIM stage, and reason-for-pass all need to live somewhere durable.
- Templated outreach. The first 30 broker emails take an hour each. The next 600 take five minutes each, but only if you've built the templates and proof-of-funds packet once and stopped re-writing them.
- CIM review. Going from CIM-in-hand to a yes-or-no decision should be a 2-hour exercise, not a 2-day one. A standard scoring rubric and a fast SDE-normalization process are what make 16 CIMs a month tractable.
- Follow-up. Most deals die from neglect, not rejection. A scheduled follow-up cadence that runs without you is the difference between 14 LOIs and 4.
Source from the actual broker market, not just one site
The Searcher OS broker directory ranks every active US small-business broker by 90-day listing activity. It's the input layer for a real top-of-funnel.
Open the broker directory →What These Numbers Should Change About Your Search
A few practical things to do with the funnel data:
- Audit your top-of-funnel pace. Are you actually scanning 200+ listings a week? If not, your sourcing layer is the bottleneck. Broaden the channels before you do anything else.
- Track your conversion rates by stage. If your scan-to-NDA rate is much worse than 4 to 5%, your buy box and your sourcing channels aren't aligned. If your NDA-to-CIM-review rate is far below 50%, brokers may not be sending you their best deals.
- Treat NDA volume as a leading indicator. 7 to 9 NDAs a week is a real search. 1 to 2 a week is hobby pace. Set the cadence and hold yourself to it.
- Build the templates once. Outreach, NDA cover, IOI, LOI. Do it on a quiet weekend, then never re-author them. The compounding savings across 600+ emails is enormous.
- Make CIM-to-decision a 2-hour standard. Whatever your current CIM process is, time it. If it's longer than a focused half-day, it's the next thing to systematize.
For a deeper view of where this volume actually comes from, see the broker market data post. 17 firms list 50% of all US small-business inventory, so the question of "which 30 brokers do I build relationships with" matters more than total listing volume. For the sourcing channels themselves, see deal sourcing strategies. And for the broker etiquette that turns NDAs into actual deal flow, see working with business brokers.
Credit and Source
The funnel benchmarks at the heart of this post are from Athena Simpson, founder of AcquiMatch, presented on stage in April 2026. The numbers reflect what AcquiMatch sees across the searcher base they work with: observed conversion rates from real, structured acquisition processes, not a hypothetical model. Credit to Athena for sharing them publicly. The framing, commentary, and operational takeaways here are mine.