Rethink Sales Podcast: Mergers & Acquisitions

Mergers & Acquisitions

The Urge to Merge and the Dilemma for Sales

Mark Donnolo
Welcome to the SalesGlobe Rethink Sales Podcast I’m Mark Donollo.

Michelle Seger
And I’m Michelle Seger.

Mark Donnolo
And today we’re going to talk about M&A mergers and acquisitions as related to the sales organization Michelle.

Michelle Seger
Yes, we are Mark what we know is that 2021 it was an unprecedented time for merger and acquisition activity. And we know that now sales organizations are going to have to deal with the downstream impact I call the downstream impact to the sales organization for what the expectations are out of that merger and acquisition. You know.

Mark Donnolo
So today we’re talking about M&A, Michelle, as it relates to the sales organization, because too often there’s this big vision of what’s going to happen with a merger and acquisition, and then the sales organization is an afterthought. What happens happens to sales.

Michelle Seger
That’s right. So in our work, Mark, the reason that we decide to do this podcast is so many times we’re called into sales organization to help them out, to help them realize some of the things that they have to do, which is often a year or more after the acquisition really takes place or the merger takes place.

Mark Donnolo
So those those big visions aren’t aren’t happening the way they thought they were going to happen. In reality.

Michelle Seger
They sure aren’t. And if we look at, you know, y y you and I were talking about why this was a really important podcast, because we know that in 20, 21, there was more M&A activity that took place than at any time in the history of the globally M&A activity. And now we also know that 70 to 90% of mergers actually fail to realize the expected benefit of the merger to begin with.

Michelle Seger
So now we’re entering a year, it’s 2022, and we’re entering a time when we’ve got all this M&A activity that took place and companies are making decisions for what it is that they want to get out of that M&A activity. And the sales organization, as we know, is going to become the the beneficiary, if you will, have realizing some of those results.

Mark Donnolo
That’s right. That’s right. So let’s get into some of the reasons that M&A happens in the first place.

Michelle Seger
Well, yeah. So we know what a few of those are. We can start with augmenting offerings. So an organization may change their strategy. I’m thinking about a very recent merger that we heard about our acquisition that we heard about, which was Hewlett-Packard. They just acquired poly Right. Which is really interesting when you think about Hewlett-Packard is come out and they said, we are going to lead the future of work.

Michelle Seger
And what we also know is that Hewlett-Packard said we’re leading in the future of what they believe is the hybrid workforce. Now, I don’t know about you, but I know when I think about Hewlett-Packard, I think about printers it’s like, what do you think about when you think about HP Enterprise?

Mark Donnolo
When I think about HP, I have nightmares back to business school that HP 12. So you calculated that the RPN and that you had to do the calculations backwards.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, there was that. And I’d be.

Mark Donnolo
Sitting in exams and everybody be like clicking away on those things. So I have like these visual reactions. But but now I think about printers right right? Because I don’t use that HP 12 CE anymore. I just use my iPhone. So I think about printers.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, we, I guess we really do. And they want us to be thinking about though how HP can enable the future work. So they bought a big brand, whole new product offer. Now I don’t know what their plans are, but I’m speculating that that’s the reason they did that. So that could be one reason. So another reason is, you know, it just becomes part of their growth strategy.

Michelle Seger
So think about really saturated markets or, you know, there’s a whole lot of players out there and small players and companies are getting bigger. So it becomes part of their growth strategy to grow by acquisition and not so much organically. And that gives them, you know, greater market coverage, for example.

Mark Donnolo
Yes, you get a few flavors of that. So you got your classic roll ups, which we’re seeing a lot of that in software right now as an example. So you’ve got a lot of technologies that you know are in the market and that whole stack can be consolidated. So you have the roll up then you have the growth strategy where take the cable business or wireless business where you have licenses or territories that can be rolled up.

Mark Donnolo
So a lot of these companies have grown that way. So, you know, there may be constraints where that’s part of the strategy or you can simply add it on faster that way rather than building it. So the acquisition growth rather than the organic.

Michelle Seger
So there’s a lot of reasons why companies, you know, acquire another company. So what is it that if we think about what the company is expected, there’s a lot of expectations that come out of the board. It depends who you’re trying to please, right? A lot of things that that happen and what we know is one of them is synergy.

Michelle Seger
So that means that what we have seen is, you know, and again, implication sales organization, you’ve got a global company that purchases another global company. How many times have we seen there’s more than one country manager, right? All the way down to so many different roles. Right. So even if they say they say we’re going to leave the sales organization intact at some point, there’s going to be a synergy expectation.

Mark Donnolo
Of synergies kind of code for, hey, we can get a lot of cost out of the business here because we’re going to have redundancies. Yeah, right. Yeah. But then you go, okay, well, we got to CEOs, to CFOs, etc., etc. But then you start working down the line into the sales organization and it gets a lot more complicated.

Michelle Seger
It gets very complicated very quickly. So synergies the second thing that we see, another big one is they’re expecting increased revenue. Right. So you just mentioned synergy. The expectation is there’s going to be a reduction in overall cost of doing business. But then at the same time, they’re expecting an increase in in revenue. And that’s a real that’s a real a tough one.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So, you know, we think about that. And then, of course, there may be an expectation on what’s being sold into the market. So think about those bundled products and services as opposed to these two sales organizations that are just going to go out and do their thing, if you will. Right. Right.

Mark Donnolo
So so you take all those and all those expectations, right? Synergies increase revenue. It’s part of our growth strategy, etc. And who wants this to happen within organizations where you get your deal people, right? You’ve got your your people at the head of the organization that want this to happen. And there are certain people that are trying to sell it to the organization to sell it to the investor is.

Mark Donnolo
And then what happens, we end up creating really high expectations. And you’re talking about 70 to 90% failing. We really high expectations that are hard to pay hard to meet.

Michelle Seger
Very hard to meet. Now what I didn’t hear you say and who I didn’t hear you say had a seat at that table is a sales leader and that’s typically what we see true so the sales leaders got inherited and deal with it but often doesn’t have any say in the augmented offerings or what the growth strategy is going to be.

Michelle Seger
They just have to figure out how to execute on that.

Mark Donnolo
So if you take those two big areas, you talk about synergies and you talk about growth. The sales organization is a big part of both of those because synergies are so many people in the sales organization for obvious reasons. There’s synergy possibilities there and growth, that’s where growth comes from is from the sales organization. So all sorts of growth strategies like we’re going to sell more stuff, but how are we going to do that, where we’re going to cross-sell all these different things we’re going to do.

Mark Donnolo
But that would say that if you’re going to do an effective job of diligence in the front end of the deal before you’re actually doing the deal, you would have a sales view on it. It may not may not be your chief revenue officer or your chief sales officer, but you have to have a sales lens on this whole thing and the diligence period before you do the deal just to understand what the realities are.

Michelle Seger
Definitely. And that’s what we see is a big miss often. And, you know, for for a note to, you know, CSIRO sales leaders, if you can, at least at this point. So we’ve done some of this work. We’ve been some sales leaders have been in a fortunate position where they’ve at least been able to use a third party to help them gather the information that they need to be able to deal with these downstream impacts and things that they know that they’re going to have to do.

Michelle Seger
But they still aren’t really able to say, well, we think we can grow by 5% when, you know, the investors have said it’s going to be 15 or whatever the number may be, we don’t see them having an influence. What we do is we see them having to execute and to realize the benefit that’s expected out of the deal.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. So if you want to get a more realistic idea of what the possibilities are, put a sales lens on it. But then you also have to balance the idea that there’s a tremendous motivation to do the deal. So they may not want to hear all that. And then you also have the other side of it, which is you may not have complete visibility on the organization that you’re going to acquire or merge with.

Mark Donnolo
Right? So so.

Michelle Seger
You may.

Mark Donnolo
Not be able to see it, see the details on the other side. So you have to do a little bit of estimation of what what’s going on there.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So, you know, a good little hint on that one. If if a sales leader can have the ability to have, like we talked about a third party, go in there and get that information for him or her. The benefit to that is that when the merger actually takes place and the press release happens, that sales leader has the ability to send out messaging and communications.

Michelle Seger
That’s really going to resonate because they know what they’re dealing with. They already know the players. They understand how the the team is structured, what their pay has been. You know, there’s a lot of information that we actually recommend that the sales leaders go and gather in advance. You can find that actually at sales ABC.com, but there’s a lot there.

Michelle Seger
But I think the main point there is get the information in advance.

Mark Donnolo
Yes. So no, so know the implications upfront because if you don’t, like you said earlier, you’re going to find out sooner or later.

Michelle Seger
That’s right.

Mark Donnolo
What’s happening in sales or what’s not happening in sales.

Michelle Seger
Right. So, Mark, let’s talk about we knew we didn’t have a whole lot of time here, so we decided to pick just three different areas that we were going to address that the sales organization inherits, if you will, as a result of expected synergies or increased revenue or whatever, whatever the the board as decided or whatever, that the purposes of the merger and acquisition and you touched on the first one.

Michelle Seger
So let’s let’s talk a little bit about cross-selling.

Mark Donnolo
Right.

Michelle Seger
Right. You know, cross-sell. The interesting thing about that is whether you’re part of a merger acquisition or not, cross-selling is just so much being put on organizations to do. So when I what I mean by that is you may have without an M&A scenario, you may have an inside sales team that’s selling something, a field sales team that’s selling something else.

Michelle Seger
And they’re trying to figure out how to cross-sell those while it becomes a whole lot more complex when you’re talking about cross-selling very different products and services from a company that you have acquired.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. So that’s that’s the great hope in a lot of acquisitions is cross-selling. And so again, at that high level, at the broad brush level, you’re going, okay, well, we have all these complementary products that we can sell when you get down to the sales level after the deal, you find out, wow, maybe our segments aren’t the same segments or maybe our buyers aren’t the same buyer.

Mark Donnolo
So if we have a product that we sell to the CIO, and then we acquire a company that as a product that gets sold to, you know, another like the operations organization, you got two different buyers. So that’s not immediately a cross-sell opportunity.

Michelle Seger
No. Now, I remember you’re making me think about a technology company that that we did some work with. And it was it was about 18 months after the sale. It closed and they had not sold they had not sold one not one customer on their side, not one. And what they determined was that it was the hung customer.

Michelle Seger
So when they went in and actually looked at the segmentation, there was so many assumptions around what that customer would buy without actually doing that due diligence. The other thing that we saw happen that we’ve seen happen is you talked about how, you know, maybe a particular purchases oversold. And sometimes there are some flaws in that purchase, but it’s too far down the road and they just go ahead and bring it in anyway.

Michelle Seger
There was another case with another client where the product and service there was that cross-sell expectation. And the issue was the product wasn’t up to par with the core product that the the the company, the parent company was offering into the client base, which was very upsetting to the sales organization.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. And to customers too, because it’s not up to par or there is a brand image from the acquired organization that customers don’t respond to. And so now this is being bundled with something that I do like and I’m being forced to to buy this thing. So you have to look at customer receptivity as well.

Michelle Seger
Now let’s talk about another challenge that happens, and that would be the ability for the the sales organization to sell that product in service. Now, I’m thinking about another client, right? Let’s let’s talk about when Plantronics bought Polycom, right? So we can talk about that. So Plantronics, it just number one in the market for headsets. Everybody knows that, right?

Michelle Seger
They’re the ones that went to the MA are the moon, not Mars? No, the.

Mark Donnolo
Moon. Yeah.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, right. Not yet. Not yet. Anyway, they went to the moon and, you know, great product. And they believe that they needed to augment their their offering into the market. And they do a lot of B2B sales, right? So inside sales wearing the headsets and then teleconferencing, you know, hardware well, they wanted to get into some virtual and other software that would augment them to software as a service.

Michelle Seger
And they bought a company that did that. That was the Polycom company. Great brand. Right. A bigger presence I believe, in Europe than than in the U.S. or abroad. And so they, they made that acquisition and there was an assumption that people would be able to sell each one of the products. Right. But you’ve got this transactional product that was handled largely by inside sales, easy sale brand name recognition, know what you’re going to get kind of thing.

Michelle Seger
And then this software with this long sales cycle, a whole lot of complication and technical, you know, expertize required and you know, that can be a real challenge. And we’ve seen that time and time again where that’s not really dealt with upfront and.

Mark Donnolo
I have to mention one of my favorite examples now this one’s from probably, I don’t know, 20 years ago, this is an old one, but I’m not going to name the company. But it was a very large transportation shipping company that we all know, and they wanted to get into the financing business, they wanted to get into the capital business and they thought, well, we’re going to start and also acquire some companies and build blank capital.

Mark Donnolo
Right? And our packaging salespeople are just going to go in and they’re going to offer financial services to the customers as well.

Michelle Seger
Wow.

Mark Donnolo
Well, obviously it’s a completely different buyer, right? But they did it. And, and, but the in the reps weren’t able to do it, but they did it and they realized, oh, you know, the logistics manager’s not buying financial services or, you know, receivables factoring or leasing or anything like that. That’s not who’s buying it. And so wrong buyer.

Mark Donnolo
And then they didn’t have the skills to do it as well because, you know, a person who’s selling shipping services doesn’t know much about financial services, but that was such a poster child a long time ago, but it was such a blatant one. It was amazing that that actually happened.

Michelle Seger
Wow. So it happens every day. All right. So the big takeaway is on cross-selling it’s going to start with, okay, make sure that you look at your customer segment, that’s a big one and understand like, you know, we I remember I was part of our approach is that we look at the customer segments of both companies and what’s the same in different because often times even there’s an assumption around what was used to identify that customer segment.

Michelle Seger
Sometimes those are different company in a company. So they’re not necessarily apples to have a sluggish segment and then also understand how that product and service is different from what you’re offering today and what needs does the organization have to even enable that? Yep. All right. So let’s shift over to sales roles now, Mark. And when we think about that, the biggest challenge is the integration of different sales roles from the different companies, right?

Michelle Seger
So we see a lot of challenges around, you know, what that looks like. And it really starts with the title of the roles. And there’s this underlying assumption that because I’m an account manager, I’m an account manager, a company am probably the same at Company B so there’s the the question of title.

Mark Donnolo
And it’s like that old adage, you know, you can’t judge a job by its title.

Michelle Seger
Mm. Okay. All right. So there’s the question of titles, but then there’s also the question of functions. So it’s also assumed the same if I’m an inside sales rep I’m a field rep, you know, what I’m doing is the same from company to company, right? And I’m just using, you know, inside and field because there’s some assumptions around that.

Michelle Seger
And I’ll bring up an example of a high tech company that we did business with. And in that example, we had to inside sales positions. And the parent company, that inside sales position was paid significantly less than the inside sales rep at the company they were acquiring.

Mark Donnolo
I remember that.

Michelle Seger
You remember that. And you know, through that due diligence, we we were able to understand what was different and why. But in the meantime, time before the merger even was finalized, what we found is that, you know, the rumor mill hit right here globally, and a lot of people from that other company just started to jump ship because they believed they were going to work for a company that was a really low payer, if you will.

Michelle Seger
That’s high tech company, which traditionally pays better than many other companies. So let’s discuss a little bit about what was different on those roles. The parent company Inside Sales was an entry level role that would lead to field sales, right? A lot of the business that they did, it was really inbound lead generation, very transactional product that had a global brand name associated with it, very easy to sell.

Michelle Seger
And people would often just, you know, buy it, could buy it from the Internet as well through e-commerce. So then you’ve got this other company that has a highly sophisticated software that they were selling and a lot of virtual demos happening. And I believe it was something like 15 to 20 years experience required to do that job. And those people earned quite a bit compared to the other.

Mark Donnolo
So really just very different jobs, even though they had the same classification or maybe even the same title.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So that’s you know, that’s a tricky one is just ah, one thing to really think about and consider is don’t make assumptions that just because you’re inside sales or you’re an account manager or here’s a good one. I heard somebody talk about a BGR business development rep and they were talking about that being an inside sales function that, you know, does this digital marketing lead qualification.

Michelle Seger
When we have another client that I’m thinking of right now, we’re BGR was actually one of the most important field sales roles that they had that was out there, you know, to get new, very strategic business for the client. Yeah. So again, the title does not tell the whole story or what was the, what was the thing? You can.

Mark Donnolo
Judge a job by its title.

Michelle Seger
Exactly. So you can’t you never know.

Mark Donnolo
You never know.

Michelle Seger
So what to do.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. What do you do? You have to have some way to classify line them up, compare them.

Michelle Seger
That’s right. Yeah. So we we do a couple of things here. And one is this role matrix that we talk about, which is really nothing more than an extension of something that we’ve been doing for a long time at sales globe around these sales dimensions of a CEO of a sales role. Yeah. And what we know is that there’s like six key dimensions.

Michelle Seger
I’d like you to take six dimensions.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. That’s our biggest hit actually.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. Oh, biggest hit on.

Mark Donnolo
The six dimensions. Yeah.

Michelle Seger
So much bigger.

Mark Donnolo
Better than the fifth dimension. Yes.

Michelle Seger
Oh, boy. So.

Mark Donnolo
So basically. So so if you just take a matrix and you put together, you know, the jobs from company and company B and you’re evaluating what they do, you could be missing things, right? So what we want to do is you want to look at those critical dimensions of what makes a job. So there are six of them.

Mark Donnolo
There’s an article out on the Sales Globe website. It sells Globacom but just in summary, they are your strategy, your sales strategy, which is is it selling to new customers, penetrating current customers or retaining current customer revenue? What segments does it work with? Could be customer segments that are, say, major accounts or middle market or small accounts or that could be designated by industry, perhaps.

Mark Donnolo
What offer do they sell? And so if they sell a single product versus they sell a full portfolio products you’re asking them to do more of the full portfolio. And then you say, okay, we’re going to take an acquired company and we’re going to merge that together and you’re going to sell even more. So you get more stuff in your in your portfolio and your quote goes up, but you expand the bandwidth out too much and then the job becomes ineffective or less effective with too many too many products.

Mark Donnolo
It has to carry sales process. Same thing. Are they doing lead generation to close to implementation or are they doing some piece of that technical knowledge so that they have to have technical knowledge about the product? Or do they get help from somebody like a systems engineer or a sales engineer? And then finally, management responsibility. So some jobs are selling sales managers.

Mark Donnolo
So it’s kind of a hybrid. So the more you say yes to any of those, the wider the bandwidth gets and the less effective the job gets. So you need to line those up, though, between the two or three or more companies and make sure you’re actually comparing on those dimensions. Yeah.

Michelle Seger
So you’ve got those six dimensions you look at. And then we also ask, you know, and this is data that’s readily available from the company is that you look at things like what is the tenure of the people that are in the jobs today? But then also the experience level that you expect. Right? So we look at things that on the job requirements, it’s how many years experience so three to five, ten to 15.

Michelle Seger
Is there certain schooling or requirements certifications that you have that that are needed for that particular role? What are the key responsible cities that they do? So all of that information coupled with the six to mention the sales role, right, that you line that out into a matrix and then you can start mapping where jobs are similar and where they are not.

Michelle Seger
And that can help you understand really what you’re looking at. And you know what? We didn’t talk about. One of the other challenges in these different sales roles is the the rules of engagement, right?

Mark Donnolo
How they work together.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. How are they going to work together?

Mark Donnolo
You know, that’s a good point because in one company, you may have a field sales rep and an inside sales rep and they work together. And in another company, you may have a field, an inside sales rep, and they each have their own territories and they actually might even compete. And I’ve seen it where they’re they even have the same accounts in one sales, one product group and the other sells another product group.

Mark Donnolo
And so you’ve got to make sure those rules of engagement are the same and the job rules are the same.

Michelle Seger
So you’ve got rules of engagement questions around the, the sales roles themselves and then rules of engagement with with regard to customers because you can also have two companies happens a lot that is servicing the same customer. Right. And in a very different way. Yeah. So know who the buyer is, know what the sales process looks like, that cycle sales cycle support.

Mark Donnolo
And when we need to mention as well is talent.

Michelle Seger
Yes.

Mark Donnolo
So okay, so you’ve architected what the jobs should look like or how they’re going to come together, but then you need somebody to go within those jobs and work with those jobs, right? So there’s a person that that performs that job and that requires a certain type of sales DNA, as we call it. Right?

Michelle Seger
So yes.

Mark Donnolo
The DNA for a Doberman or a hunter is going to be different than the DNA for, say, a retriever or what you might call a farmer or a collie you know, which is protecting the base rights of different DNA pools. But even in the same job category and account manager, one company might have a different DNA than account manager of another company.

Mark Donnolo
And you’re trying to merge them together and you’ve got like a whole pack of dogs that are that are dissimilar, right? So you got to figure out what’s the optimal profile that we’re really looking for, because you’re probably going to be doing some of this rationalization and looking for synergy. So you have to decide how you’re going to make those selections, too.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. And I just like to clarify, for those that do not understand or know about Sales Globe’s approach to defining the sales roles, Mark isn’t calling everybody a bunch of dogs right now. Just to be clear.

Mark Donnolo
It’s the technical term. It’s the canine.

Michelle Seger
Model, the canine model. And really what that simply is, is we talk about hunters and farmers. And you like to say the hunter farmer is to.

Mark Donnolo
To black and white it’s too binary. I mean, you got a hunter and a farmer. Yeah. And the hunter could get tired and become a could become a rancher. Right. But that’s all you got. Hunter, farmer, rancher. But there are there’s this is an amazing array of canines. Right. The describe sales or as you got you know, the ones we described there, you’ve got pointers you got, you know, retrievers you got specialists, right?

Mark Donnolo
Do yeah.

Michelle Seger
So so right. So for more about that, what your CEO needs to know about sales come. All right. So we got a little bit into rules of engagement talent. And I think when we talk about the role matrix, what we just want to look at is what is the type of DNA that you expect from that role. We’ll talk about the people a little bit later when we talk about pay.

Michelle Seger
But this is on The Matrix. You’re you’re looking at what the inventory looks like across those roles. But you’re really saying instead of looking at the individual level, you’re looking at the role level, the target, the title, the role responsibilities, the dimensions what you expect out of that. And so once you do that, then you can understand a little bit more about why there may or may not be differences in those roles.

Michelle Seger
And then specifically, we’ll talk about pay because that’s our next next big area where.

Mark Donnolo
Everybody’s favorite topic hey, everybody’s an expert, but everybody needs some advice.

Michelle Seger
That’s exactly right. Oh, my. So the big things that we see across the organizations is for assumed and then sometimes it’s not assumed you’ve done your role matrix, but we see overall pay differences. So the total pay is just different. That’s one piece. Another piece we see is that the pay mix may be very different for similar roles and pay mix, which is really just the percentage base paid to incentive at Target.

Michelle Seger
And Target, we know is total target compensation at quota. All right. So we know that there are payments differences, and that can be really significant when you look at, you know, presumed similar jobs and one may have, you know, a pay mix that we would call a highly leveraged role, which would be one that has, let’s say, it’s 50% of your total target compensation and 50% is actually pay at risk versus a role that’s less highly leveraged as we like to call.

Michelle Seger
And that might be something like 80, 20 or 90 ten. Right so that that can be very different across jobs. And then finally the jobs that are presumed to be similar and then finally incentive plan differences. So you’ve got those three things that can impact the same role across different companies.

Mark Donnolo
The pay mix is critical. It’s not, it’s not an academic thing. Because Pemex is the single biggest driver of behavior in the compensation plan. So if you had to account manager jobs in different companies and one was like you said, a 50 50 mix, the other was an 80 20 mix, you’re going to have two different types of behavior.

Mark Donnolo
The 50 50 mix is going to be probably more aggressive, more don’t like behavior. And the 80 20 mix is going to be probably more retriever account manager type behavior. So you put those two together in the same job, you’re going to get to different types of performance which you don’t want, you want consistency.

Michelle Seger
Right? So then, you know, let’s talk about some things that you can do. So we talked about those three different things that can happen with presumed similar roles. You’ve got pay differences overall pay the pay mix differences and then incentive plan. So the first thing we say is don’t do anything until you’ve done your role matrix and you’ve understood what it is that you’re really dealing with, what jobs are really alike and what or not.

Michelle Seger
And then we also would have them kind of look at what does that new sales organization what is that going to look like? So you I think you wanted to address those things before you just go in and randomly change.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. So you going to have it planned ahead? You have to keep in mind that the role design is going to be the foundation for the compensation design. Yes. And you mentioned, hey, competitiveness or differences in pay levels. The reason you want to plan ahead on this is so that you don’t get caught behind when the acquisition goes final.

Mark Donnolo
And the new up new organization is operating because what happens? Will competitors are there lurking around? They’re waiting. They’re waiting, you know, in the skies they’re those little black spots you see in the skies circling above your organization. In fact, I saw one example which I thought was really colorful just a couple of years ago. It was a call center, I think it was in Texas.

Mark Donnolo
And the competitors had actually put up billboards near the call center about their organization and their great jobs and great pay. Right. So they’re going directly after the people are driving to work.

Michelle Seger
Right there.

Mark Donnolo
Back when people used to go to work. Yeah.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. No shame there, huh?

Mark Donnolo
And. No, no.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, that’s pretty funny.

Mark Donnolo
Great, great. Great tactic.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So the other thing that we we really do recommend or encourage is John before you even change pay would be look at the performance. So run some analytics and really understand what you’re dealing with because these blanket pay increases that, you know, company may be compelled to do may not be appropriate. So are you really going to raise the pay significantly of poor performers, for example?

Michelle Seger
So we ask people to do some due diligence around just what’s the data telling you around the people. And then you can really look at pay treatment yeah.

Mark Donnolo
So you’re connecting all those pieces together, then you’re connecting together your organization, enroll design with the talent that you need with the pay that’s going to be driving that.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So there’s a lot to think about. So in summary, we discussed that there are a lot of challenges in M&A for a sales organization and there’s more information. In fact, we have an article that we just released that’s on our website. It’s called The Urge to Merge and Things You Can Do About It. And we’ve also got those six dimensions of the sales roles.

Michelle Seger
So anything that you can do around due diligence in advance of of that merger acquisition closing would be really the number one piece of advice we would give any sales leader and manager. And then just that whole roll calibration piece, don’t underestimate that before you jump to a lot of conclusions around what you should do next. So it’s it’s quite a.

Mark Donnolo
Sausage to basically be ready to look at it in your in your diligence. Don’t don’t miss the whole sales implication and then be ready when the whole thing goes live so that you’re not caught in a bad position.

Michelle Seger
That’s it. So thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Mark, thank you for your insight as well.

Mark Donnolo
Well, thank you, Michelle. Yeah.

Michelle Seger
All right. You’re welcome, Mark. So anyway, we really appreciate all of you for listening today and hope that it was helpful. And we will see you the next time.

Mark Donnolo
All right.

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