What is a teaser?
A teaser is the short, anonymous summary a sell-side banker sends to potential buyers at the very start of a sale process. Usually one or two pages, it describes the business in enough detail to spark interest — the industry, the rough size, the highlights of the opportunity — without naming the company. Its job is to find out who is interested before any confidential information changes hands.
The teaser comes before the NDA. A buyer that wants to learn more signs a non-disclosure agreement, and only then receives the named, detailed confidential information memorandum. The teaser is deliberately thin: it has to be circulated to a wide set of potential buyers, some of whom are competitors, so it gives away as little identifying detail as possible.
For the banker, the teaser is also a filtering tool. The responses to it tell the seller which buyers are worth bringing further into the process and which are not.
What a teaser contains
A teaser is built to be informative yet anonymous.
- Business description. What the company does and the market it serves, described generically enough not to identify it.
- Investment highlights. A few headline reasons the business is attractive — growth, margins, market position.
- Summary financials. Approximate scale — revenue and earnings ranges — without precise figures that would reveal the company.
- The opportunity. Why the business is being sold and what a buyer could do with it.
- Contact and process. How an interested buyer can sign an NDA and proceed.