4 Tactics for Sales Success After a Company Merger
Company mergers are exciting. Two companies come together to form one new entity that is greater than the sum of its parts. It can mean greater financial strength, which can lead to higher market share, more influence over customers, and reduced competitive threat.
At the same time, however, mergers are highly stressful and full of challenges. Reaping the rewards does not come easily. Roughly 80% of all mergers and acquisitions fail, according to Harvard Business Review. McKinsey found more than 70% of mergers fail to reach their expected revenue targets.
One of the leading causes of failure occurs during the post-merger sales integration process. Each sales team has relied on their own way of doing things. Now they must learn new processes, sales methodologies, and product portfolios, while having to navigate cultural differences and internal bureaucracies.
Complicating things even further, mergers may involve bringing together two teams that were previously competitors. Your business survival relies on the accelerated readiness of your newly combined salesforce to ensure you achieve your commercial objectives.
To streamline the post-merger integration process, you need a single sales enablement solution that allows you to integrate the two sales teams as easily and quickly as possible. Sales readiness is paramount if you are to achieve your revenue goals and guarantee the merger succeeds. Here are four things you can do to ensure sales success after a merger.
4 Ways to Ensure Sales Success After a Merger
1. Unify Your Brand, Content, and Messaging
When merging two companies, your sales and marketing teams have to learn and deliver new messaging and unique differentiators to the marketplace. With conflicting marketing materials and sporadic training, reps and managers are left to fend for themselves in the field.
Solution: Equip sellers with easy access to a central platform that has the most up-to-date collateral, brand messaging, and go-to-market strategies. Armed with that information, your sellers will have the confidence and competence to represent the value of your newly integrated organization.
Look for a sales enablement platform that lets you:
- Increase seller effectiveness by providing mobile-first, always-on access to leadership communications, sales training, marketing content, coaching, and just-in-time learning
- Support commercial operations across regions to allow consistent branding and messaging while maintaining user and group permissions
- Measure the impact of marketing content based on seller and buyer engagement levels and iterate using feedback from the field
2. Improve Organizational Communication and Streamline Alignment
To achieve M&A business objectives and accelerate enablement, sales organizations must work to align messaging and goals. Leaders must have the ability to broadly communicate clear direction, objectives, and intended outcomes to motivate and engage sellers.
Solution: Use the power of agile video messages to keep distributed teams informed with the most relevant content, marketing collateral paired with video explainers with context on how and when to use materials, and other time-sensitive information. Unlock communication and feedback paths with asynchronous video to help sales leaders and marketers gain greater visibility into training and content outcomes.
Look for a sales enablement platform that:
- Empowers leaders and experts to easily create and share corporate communications with product news, market updates, or competitive intel
- Ensures sellers deliver consistent messaging by guiding them with sales playbooks, AI-powered recommendations, curated content, and institutional best practices
- Eliminates system silos by streamlining access to selling tools, company processes, and CRM information
3. Support Cultural Integration and Promote Team Collaboration
When acquisitions occur, the ultimate goal should be for your sales teams to feel as connected and empowered as they did before the merger. Communication and collaboration are critical. And the effort must be intentional—from the top down and the bottom up.
Solution: Maintain communication and increase cultural strengths using asynchronous
collaboration, personalized videos, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and subject matter expert best practices.
Use a sales enablement platform to:
- Create a company video directory filled with personalized employee introductions to welcome and unite geographically dispersed teams
- Facilitate stronger collaboration with subject matter experts and top performers to improve knowledge transfer and share best practices
- Disseminate seller insights from the field on handling buyer objections, winning tactics, and tips for cross-selling products
4. Increase Visibility Into M&A Outcomes
Several things can lead to M&A failure: unrealistic expectations, poor integration, lack of communication, and lack of a management plan, to name a few. Being prepared for all the possibilities and pitfalls will increase the likelihood of a smooth and successful union.
Solution: Measure the impact of your sales activities on outcomes and evaluate content effectiveness and rep competencies to stay ahead of roadblocks.
Use a sales enablement platform to:
- Understand individual and team training progress, skill acquisition, competencies, and engagement levels with marketing and training content
- Address skill gaps quickly and efficiently with AI-powered training recommendations, targeted coaching delivery, and intelligent ongoing reinforcement
- Employ methodologies and proven best practices to increase seller adoption levels
- Measure the impact sales content has on business outcomes
Sales Enablement Key to Merger Success
While integrating two sales teams is complex and challenging, having the right plan and sales enablement platform can make the process a lot easier. And your successful integration will help ensure the merger succeeds—and that your new company becomes a leader in the market.
Learn More:
Download the How to Evaluate Sales Enablement Tools Checklist to determine which sales enablement platform best meets your needs.
