How HR and People teams can integrate sales teams to maximise revenue synergies in M&A

Often the rationale for a merger or acquisition (M&A) will be to access new markets, expand the customer base and critically – cross-sell new products or services to existing clients. However, realising these benefits is notoriously challenging, often leading to a 'growth plateau' post-deal if not managed proactively. Organisations that realise their growth ambitions consistently prioritise the customer and Go-To-Market (GTM) requirements from the outset, recognising that these functions are the highest drivers of revenue synergies and sustained growth.

In this article we explore some of the challenges that you might face, and what you as a People / HR team can do to set your sales and commercial teams up for success.

Key people challenges

Typically, in an integration, sales teams may be required to sell new products or services, work in a new team structure and navigate an overlap in the client base – all of which creates a strain. While each integration will be different, we see a few consistent challenges:

• Sales priorities: In the immediate post-deal period (Day 1 to Day 100), sales teams often lack clear, actionable direction and specific targets for the newly combined entity leading to confusion and missed sales opportunities.
• Missing data: Sales teams often struggle with disparate customer data, inconsistent pricing information, and a lack of integrated sales performance metrics. This makes it difficult to plan, track, and report cross-sell opportunities effectively, and leads to sales people unknowingly covering the same territory or customer or not having the insights they need to spot opportunities.
• Knowledge gaps: Sales teams will not have a thorough understanding of new products and services, and regulatory restrictions typically mean that they’re not able to build up any knowledge until Day 1 itself.
• Sales incentives: These will be different on both sides, and are often challenging to align. Having different incentives can create a sense of unfairness which creates barriers between teams, and misaligned incentives can directly impede the realisation of cross-sell opportunities and revenue growth.
• Behaviours and attitudes: There are challenges here that are much more prevalent in sales teams than elsewhere. Sales professionals are on the front end, competing in the market – this means they may have been in direct competition with people they are now counting as colleagues, and selling products that they previously were competing against. They may have pre-conceived ideas about those products and their new colleagues which will require time and effort to overcome.
• Leadership and structure: Commercial team structures are usually lifted and shifted at Day 1 and for good reason as maximising business continuity is the focus and changing things around could cause disruption. However, this means that at Day 1 everything will stay the same, creating structural, and sometimes physical barriers to collaboration.

Practical tips the People team can use for success

The People team plays a critical role in proactively driving sales teams to foster effective collaboration and unlock significant deal value. Here are just a few ways that the People team can lead the way:

• Communicate: A compelling 'growth story' for the combined entity is needed, clearly outlining the deal's upside for both customers and employees. Sales leaders will need a strategic vision to realise revenue synergy targets, detailing how individual sales teams contribute.
• Training: Prior to Day 1 teams on both sides should leverage existing training materials to create a comprehensive upskilling programme for sales teams that can be rolled out as early as possible. Consider leveraging friendly clients to share testimonials about their experience to bring to life their core differentiators and enhanced customer proposition – and be very clear about how the combined product set for the newly integrated business operates in the market.
• Reward: Typically incentives are highly localised and it can take some time to understand what is currently in place. Think carefully about the behaviours that you want to encourage, and make sure you have the accurate and timely commercial data you need to track performance. Incentive schemes are an emotive topic, so clear communication delivered in a timely manner is critical. Some top tips include:
  • Review your new incentive scheme to ensure one product set is not inadvertently favoured over another
  • Build in flexibility to adjust as you go through the integration process
  • Take into account the local market
  • Explicitly reward integration-related sales motions, for example, cross-selling through ‘SPIFFs’ (Sales Performance Incentive Funds), up-selling, collaboration across legacy teams, and alignment with revenue synergy targets
  • Reward customer lifetime value over individual product sales
• Collaboration: Building relationships across legacy organisations, with leaders role modelling collaboration is key. Some practical ways to do this are:
  • Establish 'GTM SWAT teams' early on, focused on specific priority cross-sell propositions or key accounts. These teams, comprising members from both legacy organisations, can pilot new ways of working and build shared success stories, fostering a unified GTM culture and accelerating the testing and scaling of new propositions
  • Co-locate teams with designated on-site days and opportunities to share success stories in an informal setting (such as key client wins)
  • Create a buddy scheme where you connect individuals from legacy organisations in a more formalised way, encouraging regular connect points to help teams learn from each other
  • Consider secondments between teams, particularly where teams are currently cross-geography – moving someone from Frankfurt to London for a few months is a great development opportunity for top talent
• Organisation design: Get your leadership team clear as early as possible and consider how you want teams to work together both now and in the future, based on your target operating model. Structure the teams in a logical way for the integrated business (such as by product set, geography or market segment) and identify your key clients, resolving any duplication of account management from Day 1. This may involve difficult decisions but delaying it will cause significant problems. This proactive design helps to avoid structural barriers to collaboration and ensures that the GTM is optimised for profitable growth.

Ultimately, the HR and People team is pivotal in transforming M&A growth ambitions into reality. By proactively addressing sales and commercial challenges through strategic communication, training, incentives, collaboration, and organisation design, they can unlock significant revenue synergies and support sustained post-merger growth.

If your organisation is going through an integration and you are grappling with how to set up your sales and commercial teams for success, please get in touch.