Let me finish up our top six transaction stories from 2012, as chosen by the World Technology Council, Corum's 400-person advisory body. I'm only including some of the highlights here, so if you'd like to listen to the whole webinar, and the individual thoughts of the speakers, follow this link: http://www.corumgroup.com/Software-MA-Webinar-Archive.aspx.

Reggie Bradford, founder of the social marketing platform Vitrue, spoke about the importance of timing in determining an M&A exit: [Just like] every child, every company faces certain stages of maturity and taking it to the next level is like sending a kid off to college. [Given] the stage that Vitrue was at, and where the industry was, and how fast the space was moving we really needed to identify a partner.

Thomas Berglund of Edvantage, which was acquired by Lumesse, talked about keeping focus and establishing expectations: [Focus is] all about the numbers [and we] learned to have the right expectations. We used several approaches and found a tendency to overpromise all the time. And that is extremely difficult because then you have an investment member who makes a lot of promises to create a good valuation. So setting the right expectation is key and we [ultimately] managed to do that. It took us six months, and I believe that was one of the key drivers in closing the deal.

Finally, Rob Tietjen of PolicyTech, provider of policy and procedure management software which sold to Navex Global, discussed the benefit of playing strategic and financial players off each other - and leveraging an understanding of what your buyers are looking for: Wed been approached in the past, but we were always faced with the challenge of not knowing if we were getting the best offer. We went to market in a process led by Corum and we received exposure to a broad range of potential strategic buyers as well as Private Equity firms. This dialogue gave us a much better sense of the value of our solution and the benefits that we could bring to an acquirer. Not just technology, but domain expertise, our customer base, our team, and our solid recurring revenue.

These 6 transaction stories from 2012, deemed most interesting by the World Technology Council, are strongly representative of the information and insight you'll be able to glean from our monthly Tech M&A webinars. They're also an excellent indicator as to whats ahead from Corum in 2013.