By Will Lopez
2020 saw some of the biggest mergers and acquisitions (M&A) with brand name companies; Salesforce acquiring Slack for $27.7 billion, Uber acquiring Postmates for $2.65 billion, Teledoc acquiring Livongo for $18.5 billion and many more. Although 2020 was a challenging year for many companies, M&As are great strategies used to expand your company’s market share or used to combine market share to survive. Regardless of the companies starting, undergoing, or completing an M&A, at the center of the transaction are the customers and the team that manages the support and services to those customers.
So how do you navigate an M&A, and successfully integrate your teams? Here are four tips to help you:
1. Do research on the company you’re merging with or acquiring
In 2020 Phone2Action acquired two companies, GovPredict and KnowWho. Once you are informed, spend some time researching the company and learning more about their products, teams, and services. Questions you can use to begin with:
1. What products do they have and how will they complement your current offerings?
2. What do customers say about their product?
3. Who is on the customer success team and how is it structured?
The answers to these questions are a great foundation for you to understand the company you are merging with, and their teams.
2. Put yourself in your teams’ shoes
Once the acquisition is within its final stages, you’ll want to begin prepping information to update your team. Depending on the status of the merger, you might be able to loop in managers on your team to assist with the rollout. Regardless, put yourself in your teams’ shoes. Keep in mind, you have been in several meetings and discussions and have had time to prepare mentally for the acquisition. Items that can help you rollout the news to your team:
1. Internal FAQs and talking points for your specific department: Sit down and write out questions your team will have when the announcement is made, those make for great FAQ’s. Also create customer talking points for the team that share the value proposition of the M&A, and templates to help your team share the news with customers.
2. Prep your Managers and Directors: It’s always a great idea to let them know first, they can help with the rollout and answer questions from the team.
3. Create a rollout plan: Create a simple presentation that answers why your company underwent an M&A, description of the organization and team you’re merging with, and timeline of next steps for the team.
There is a lot of excitement and questions during an M&A, it’s great to channel that excitement and anticipate questions your team may have.
3. Customers, customers, and customers
At the core of any M&A, customers are the reason your company went through the process of merging two companies. Once your company is ready to make the announcement, several pieces move at once; announcing to the company, answering your teams’ questions, and notifying your customers. Share in the excitement: Develop a plan to announce to your top customers. You and your leadership team can divide your most valuable customers into groups, and for the more important customers, give them a call, they value the personal touch. When your company has made it public, work with your Customer Success team to inform their customers. We asked our customer success managers to call their top five accounts and email all their customers personally of the news.
4. Integrating Customer Success Teams
After the excitement of the announcement, now the real work begins - integrating the teams. Each company is different, but once you’ve determined the future team structure, it’s critical you merge the teams.
1. Spend time explaining the future state of your team: There will be a lot of transition, and exciting news, keep in mind to share your vision of the team TO the team. As leaders, we get caught up on deploying the vision and forget communicating it.
2. Make it exciting when the team finally meets: The first team meeting sets the tone of the team, make it exciting! At Phone2Action, we had a Customer Success kick-off meeting where we invited all customer success teams and created icebreaker moments for the teams to interact with one another and get to know everyone.
3. Training, training, and more training: Spend time training the entire team on your onboarding and customer journey, the new and current software, processes, expectations for interacting with customers, and outlining Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and goals. Outline a plan for training and include different team members as part of the plan, it gives others on the team an opportunity to meet with new members of the team.
Mergers and acquisitions are really exciting, and a great opportunity to refocus on the team.
Looking to add to your leadership toolkit? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a Leadership Certification program designed for Success leaders. For more information on this and our other programs and offerings, see TheSuccessLeague.io
Will Lopez - Will brings 10 years of experience to Phone2Action. His focus on delivering customers' goals and outcomes has created relationships with senior executives from organizations, such as American Heart Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to Fortune-500 companies, such as Walmart and JP Morgan Chase. Will’s dedication to the customer experience has led to improved retention and revenue growth.