Selling a technology business puts two things in front of a buyer that a broker has to be able to handle: revenue that is only as good as its retention, and a codebase somebody else's engineers will read. A firm fluent in one and not the other will lose you money on the half they do not understand.
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Revenue fluency
Recurring revenue, retention gross and net, cohorts, contract length and concentration, and acquisition cost against lifetime value, all reconciled to the billing system. A broker who cannot construct and defend those numbers will present a spreadsheet that diligence dismantles, and the damage is to trust rather than just to the figure.
Technical fluency
They need to know what a buyer's technical diligence will ask: dependencies and their licenses, security history, deployment practice, documentation, and who actually understands the system. Their job is not to answer those questions but to make sure you have answered them before the buyer asks, which is the difference between disclosure and discovery.
Reach and what it costs
Strategic acquirers and software funds are approached by name; individual buyers use the specialist platforms, which are unusual in this trade for publishing their fees. The published US figures on this site run from 5% to 15% depending on price band and how much of the process the platform runs.
Questions people ask about technology business brokers
Do I need a technology specialist?
For anything reaching institutional buyers, yes. At the smaller end the specialist marketplaces reach the buyers who dominate that segment.
Should I do my own technical diligence first?
If the deal is large enough to justify it, yes. It finds what the buyer's will find while there is still time to fix it.
What is the most common problem found?
Intellectual property ownership gaps, usually a contractor who never signed an assignment, followed by an undocumented single point of failure in the team.