Studies show that roughly 80% of all mergers and acquisitions fail. Ouch. One of the leading causes is failure to integrate.
The two company cultures don’t intermingle. Perhaps the management teams from each company don’t coalesce. Or maybe even the sales and marketing teams from the two competing companies start working together but quickly discover that they don’t exactly mesh.
Regardless of the cause, failure to integrate creates inefficiencies, produces a toxic work environment, sabotages sales, and tanks the merger or acquisition.
If another company is merging with yours or if you are acquiring another company, you must ensure that your teams—from management down to juniors—integrate. Your business survival depends upon it.
What’s surprising is that you can depend on merger and acquisition success in an unlikely place: Your sales platform. Continue reading to learn how.
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1. Unify Your Brand
In the world of mergers and acquisitions, one plus one equals one. You take two brands, combine them through a merger or acquisition, and you end up with one new brand, or the same old brand, just better.
Your job when combining these two is to get the new brand up and running, quickly, easily, and willingly. A sales enablement platform helps you do this by providing a single portal for all of your branding materials.
This platform is where you can unify and upload your new logo, brand guidelines, design guides, and more. It’s the place where everyone in the organization goes to get guidance on the composition, design, and general appearance of your new branding.
2. Unify Your Messaging
When you take two competing companies and combine them through a merger or acquisition, the sales and marketing teams have to learn a new way of talking with your customers.
They’re going to have a new elevator pitch to learn, for one thing. And a new way of describing the company and its unique differentiators in the marketplace. Your sales platform accelerates this process by providing a central repository for all brand messaging, go-to-market communications, sales playbooks, and more.
The best sales platforms make these materials available to your sales and marketing teams 24/7, on every device, with or without an internet connection.
3. Integrate Your Collateral
Mergers and acquisitions typically require a revamp of entire lines of product brochures, sales decks, spec sheets, case studies, and more. Suddenly, two competing sales and marketing teams must all start singing from the same hymnal.
This means your company needs to supply one source of truth for every kind of sales collateral and content you need. A content enablement platform delivers this. You upload and distribute your new internal and external content to sellers and channel partners for instant access based on user and group permissions.
Your content enablement platform ensures that your sellers and channel partners use your new and updated content only. The best platforms offer continuous sync for real-time distribution in every one of your sales territories, make content available to your reps offline when Wi-Fi connections are spotty, and provide access to all new content on all electronic devices, whether mobile phones, tablets, laptops or desktops.
4. Align Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing alignment is hard enough when you have just one of each. Add a merger or acquisition into the mix, and you must suddenly integrate two sales departments, then integrate two marketing departments, then align the new sales and marketing departments. Not an easy feat.
But your results can be different. A simplified yet sophisticated sales enablement platform helps you align the sales and marketing teams from both companies. Modus, for example, has built-in functionality that streamlines processes, quickly getting your reps to understand new products and offerings easily and quickly.
Make Your Merger or Acquisition a Success
Whether you are contemplating a merger or acquisition to grow market share, eliminate competition, improve synergies, increase your supply-chain purchasing power, or something else, your success depends on your ability to integrate two teams, cohesively. Easy? No. Possible? Yes. And Modus can help. Request your demo now.
