Does my domain name have to match my business name?

So, here are the statistics: 98% of consumers use the internet to find information about local businesses, according to BrightLocal.
Let's assume that you have a potential customer that heard something about your company.
It's obvious that the first thing this customer would do is to insert the company name into google and press enter.

What's next? If your company name matches your domain name, then with high probability google would put you on top of the search page. The customer would click the corresponding search result, visiting your website. As a result, you have a chance to sell your product or services, therefore making money.

Let's now assume that your domain name and your company name are different. If customer would search your company name now, then there is a big chance that google wouldn't match the company name with the domain you are using. As a result, your website wouldn't be shown among the search results, or would be shown way too far from the top.

Remember now, that 98% of potential customers look for business on the internet. So, 98% of customers would not be able to find you! This is a disaster for any business!

Let's now assume that the domain name matching your company name is owned by another company. That's even more terrible! Now, when searching for your business, the customers will find your competitor instead of you. As the result, you are not just not making any money, but you send your potential customer to the competitor. How can any business be profitable in these conditions?

Here is a real example: recently we got contacted by a Chinese company, which wanted to buy a two-word domain we own with asking price below $10,000. Let's say that the domain name is GreatCompany.com. This is quite a big company, targeting corporate clients with an average check of several thousand dollars! The deal didn't go through, and the company decided to use GreaCompany.com, i.e. they just removed the last letter from the first word in the domain name, saving therefore some money by not purchasing the exact match .com domain.

So, recently I tried to google for the GreatCompany. I entered "GreatCompany" into google and pressed Enter. And the results were astonishing! The company's website would appear only on the third page of the search results. Even better, our exact match domain (GreatCompany.com) with just the "For Sale" landing (without any real content and SEO optimization) would appear on the first page! I'm sure that if our domain had real content, it would appear on the top.

Now, let's remember (once again) that 98% of consumers use the internet to find information about local businesses. Also, let's remember that the average check of the company is several thousand dollars. Now, you should understand the scale of the disaster! Even worse, in case if a different company would purchase this domain name, they would receive all of the traffic.
And the original company will never be able to get the matching .com for any reasonable price.

So, answering the question in the title of the article: you MUST own the domain name that matches your company name. There is no way around it in the 21st century.