Mergers & Acquisitions:
Priceless Advice for Sales Leaders

Michelle Seger
What other advice would you give sales leaders, and then I’m gonna follow up some about cross sell, because it’s a big pain point. What other advice? Would you give a sales leader that, you know, now here they are, right, they’ve been given the charge of you got a new company that’s coming in and here are the expectations from the board, you didn’t have any say on what that was gonna look like, or the quotas or anything? What advice would you give the sales leader as he or she is taking on that new role?

Keith Conley
Well, you know, one is kind of role modeling, not becoming internally focused, right, and all this stuff is going on, people are worried about they have a job and so forth, you know, role modeling your discussions about the client first, is extremely important, because as you mentioned, the politics and so forth. If the sales leader is a role model, that lot of stuff can internally, he start taking an eye off the ball. The second is, you know, they’re going to participate, but don’t rush the comp plan, the territory planning, right. And then the third is just overall communication, like we would have our sales lead, we’d give them extra money to physically get the sales reps together, right. Monthly basis, initially, then quarterly basis, and then we’re back to normal. And that’s an investment, you know, sales, revenue coming flying in from all over the place. But that’s just an opportunity to really communicate where you are, what’s going on, and a lot of q&a, build the team stuff. So I would say make that an investment in getting your teams physically together to get to know each other.

Michelle Seger
I remember one global sales leader, we, we were doing an acquisition for the integration of the sales organization. And he went, I mean, it was a global company multibillion dollar, and he went into all the different locations. And he would wear a costume, it was really kind of funny, he dressed up as Big Bird for one, and nobody knew he was coming in, and it was their CRO, and he would walk in, and we would hear you know about this after but it really broke the ice. And, you know, let them know a little bit about this person and his individual style. But you know, I’m not saying everybody has to wear a costume. But making that personal connection and getting out there I would agree with you is really key. Yeah.

Keith Conley
And I also saw this one sales rep when he pulled this meeting, together, he brought in one of their top clients. And the client spoke about what it’s like to be a client of Epiq, what they like and what their challenges are like these multi touch points, "sometimes I get a little confused", solution architect or sales rep... it was really interesting is just, it was a great idea. And yet to have a certain level of client relationship to have someone come in and be honest. I wish we had filmed that if we could, but that’s just an example of a really good leadership move, to again, try to make things client centric and client focused and not get the internal consternation you know, swimming.

Michelle Seger
Yep. So I want to bring you back to cross sell for a minute if I if I could, because we do find it’s one of the biggest challenges and you know what, you’re right. What we see day in and day out is we’ll go in and we find out that the cross sell synergies are the cross sell expectations aren’t there. And we could tell you for a fact we know over 90% of companies that acquire another one, 90% of the cross sell expectations do not occur. We do know that in 90% of cases. So you already discussed some of the mistakes that we’ve seen as Oh, they’ll spiff it to death. We had one that was they were even giving a car. I mean, we have seen so much for just so many in a month right? I’m sure you have seen a lot more than we have.

Keith Conley
We did a Porsche! We leased the Porsche for two years. We brought him down to Atlanta, to drive on the Porsche track.

Michelle Seger
Oh my god, so it doesn’t matter. Right. So, you know, and I agree with you that a lot, oh, and then I had another one, this would be more like a stick, but they didn’t expect it to be a stick. So they want to cross sell, and they had legacy products. But the solution was, we’re going to create a threshold to pay for everything. So you won’t get upside, or any decent pay on your core products, until you hit a certain level of expectation on cross sell. Well guess what? Their top performers started, they were blowing it out of the water with their, you know, traditional products and services and weren’t earning anything. And they started to leave. That was a panicked call that we got that one time. So when you think about that, and we realize the importance that salespeople have with their client, their relationships, their revenue, right? What, what advice, would you give sales leaders on first steps to take when they’re thinking about cross sell?

Keith Conley
Well, I think the more comfortable a sales rep is with the service offerings that they’re supposed to cross sell, and the people associated with those services, the better off they are. Versus some marketing, stick with some PowerPoint and so forth. I mean, having them understand if they’re solution architects or pre sales, people in there, you know, get them working with the sales reps, and educating them on this and getting comfortable with the solution. So their perceived initial risk of what this could do to my existing revenue can be reduced, that I found that to be fairly effective, not for all, but for many, you know, that education of those other services that they want, and then pull through? Because I think it senior executives, you kind of me, you see all these services, and you're kind of thinking, why are they doing this, and then you go, well, he’s straight to the rep, and they don’t really understand the service that well. And that’s contributes to why they feel there’s risk there. So that education, ongoing education, not an event, but the ongoing education of these services, and case studies, you can share in the winds that occur. Hey, you know, Sally just sold this, let’s talk about how she did it new, I think is very positive and can help the cause.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, you know, to that point Keith, Michelle there was a recent situation where it was a client there was there was an acquisition they had made, they were trying to get cross sell to happen. And the core reps perceived that bringing in this other organization actually slowed down the sales process. Yeah, and made it more complicated when in fact, it could accelerate it, and it could make retention better, but it was just a misperception. And communications was a big issue, because they had, they had unfortunately, turnover in the sales organization. They had new people. So they were they weren't getting the same messaging, as well.

Keith Conley
And that’s one of the biggest challenges as you get larger. I mean, the things about when you’re small, you’re nimble, you can make decisions quickly. But the larger you get, there’s more layers of communication, there’s lower protocols, if you’re public, there’s more things. And that’s the most difficult thing is how do you not lose what made you so successful? Especially as a salesperson can get something approved like this, versus having to go through your CFO committee and takes your, you know, days, if not a week to get approval? That that has been probably one of the things I don’t always focus on, and look for client feedback on this area as well. But that’s one of the biggest challenges. How do you stay nimble by balance the ability to be nimble versus the process that you have to have in place or processes when you get larger? And how do you balance those two is a challenge.