Business Broker KPIs: The Numbers Worth Tracking

Your practice has its own numbers, and most of them are not on a general CRM's default dashboard.

The numbers that describe your practice

Open and response rates tell you how a message is landing, and they are covered in reading the pattern across your deals. These five are different. They describe the business of taking an engagement from signed to closed.

Each one is a date, a count or a stage that should already live in your CRM. Where the industry publishes a figure, it is included here so you have something to hold your own against.

Your time to close

The IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse survey for the second quarter of 2026 found that Main Street transactions averaged six to 10 months from engagement to close, and lower middle market deals averaged 11 to 12 months.

That is useful context. Your own average is the one you can plan with, because it tells you how far ahead to think and how long a seller should expect to wait.

Quick winPull your last five closed deals and note the days from signed engagement to close. Add both dates as fields on every engagement from now on.

Your close rate

The 2026 Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report, drawing on more than 500 participants across the private capital market, found that a third of M&A engagements never close. Your own rate is the one that helps you plan. It tells you how many engagements you need to sign to reach the number of closings you want in a year.

Split it by where the engagement came from, whether a referral, a past client or an inbound inquiry, and it starts to show you which sources produce closings and not only conversations.

Quick winCount the engagements you signed over the last two years and how many of them closed. Tag each one with where it came from.

The gap at signing

The same Pepperdine report names a valuation gap between buyer and seller as the single most cited reason a deal does not close, and the most common gap was only 11 to 20 percent. A gap like that usually exists on the first day, before any buyer is involved.

If you record the seller's number and your own valuation at the first meeting, you can see over time how far apart you usually start, and how often that distance closes before you go to market.

Quick winOn every new engagement, record the seller's expected price and your own valuation side by side.

Where buyers drop out

The buyer side has its own funnel: inquiry, signed NDA, CIM sent, management meeting, offer. Counting each step on a listing shows you where buyers stop. If many buyers receive the CIM and few ask for a meeting, the package or the price usually deserves a second look. If few inquiries sign the NDA, the place to look is how that request is made.

What counts as a good result depends on the size of the deal. The IBBA survey found that 87 percent of deals over $5 million drew at least three offers and 33 percent drew ten or more, while deals under $500,000 frequently drew one or two. So the comparison that helps most is your last few listings of a similar size.

Quick winFor your current listing, count the inquiries, signed NDAs, CIMs sent, meetings and offers. Write the five numbers down, then repeat on the next listing.

What you are likely to be paid, and when

An engagement can run for many months, so a list of active deals only tells you part of the story. The useful forecast is what those deals are likely to pay and when.

Give each active engagement an expected fee and a stage. Give each stage a probability based on your own history, from your close rate and your time to close. Add them up. The total is a working estimate you can compare with what you actually closed, and it gets sharper each quarter.

Quick winPut an expected fee and a stage on every active engagement, and total them once a month.

Use the industry numbers as a mirror

Published averages vary by deal size, sector and how each survey defines its terms, so treat them as a way to check your own numbers and not as targets. The comparison that matters is your figure this quarter against your figure last quarter.

Every number here is a date, a count or a stage. If getting one takes a spreadsheet, that is the field to add to your CRM.