Whether your company has acquired three companies, or 300 companies, you know how hard it is to get sales teams working and selling together. Many acquisitions fail to generate the expected revenue growth because they can’t operationalize a joint sales motion.
But if you can get this right – then you can identify net new accounts to sell to, accelerate cross-sell revenue growth, shorten your sales cycle, and increase consumption of your services.
Here’s what Sales Enablement Teams Need for M&A Integrations:
Post-M&A, the sales operations and sales enablement teams at each company need the right visibility into each other’s accounts in order to develop a high-impact joint sales strategy in each region. This requires knowing:
- Overlap by industry (shapes your vertical strategy)
- Overlap by segment (identifies your market opportunity and informs your sales strategy within each segment)
- Overlap by customers vs. prospects (guides your strategy on an account-by-account basis)
- Account ownership (so sales reps can connect with the right counterpart for each account and deal)
With this information and the right platform, sales operations and sales enablement teams can:
- Plan appropriate sales team cross-product training
- Prioritize cross-company team-building events for specific sales teams
- Develop cross-selling strategies for enterprise accounts
- Enable both sales teams to see their counterpart account owner with their own CRM system immediately
- Make it easy for sales reps to start collaborating with their counterparts on an account-by-account basis
We understand the nuances of what it takes for two sales organizations to gradually build trust so they can drive revenue together. And we have built the PartnerTap platform to give both channel and sales teams the operational data and tools they need to identify new revenue opportunities and start collaborating while they build new trusted relationships.
Here’s what Sales Reps need to Drive more Revenue post M&A
While sales enablement teams need lots of data and dashboards, sales reps need easy and fast access to their sales counterparts on shared accounts.
For example:
- Someone who’s already sold into the account can share what they know about the buyers, their existing technology footprint, their budgets, and their procurement process.
- When a deal is going sideways, and a sales rep needs fast insight into what has changed inside an account, their counterpart sales reps can share insights that could help influence and get the deal back on track.
These are just two of many examples where the two sales teams can help each other accelerate sales and drive more revenue. Even though they’re working in separate CRM systems, sales reps need real-time access to everything going on at their accounts, and who else is working in each account. Specifically, account executives need:
- Sales rep contact info: the name and contact information for their new sales peers that sell into the same account. Must be always up-to-date as account owners change when people change roles and territories are adjusted.
- Full view of all purchased products: visibility into the full set of products already purchased from each company.
- Sales opportunities: visibility into recent and open sales opportunities from both companies at each account.
- Text-based communications: informal chat-based communication options that make it fast and easy to share information with each other.
- Sales collaboration history: the ability to see past conversations between sales reps and previous sales rep owners of each account.
This level of coordination between sales teams is possible if they have the right account level visibility, access to other sales reps, and a fast way to share information. Choosing a platform that enables this type of visibility (and security) is critical to the success of the merger. Check out Part 3 of this series to learn more about the PartnerTap Ecosystem Sales Platform and how it can help enterprise companies drive more revenue from newly acquired companies.