Video Transcript

We frequently have clients who either start working with E3 after a merger or acquisition, or as we’re working with them they complete a merger acquisition, and fairly regularly we see some issues inside of mergers and acquisitions and it’s often around the combining of the marketing teams.

And there are a couple of things that we really see over and over again that makes this process either go more smoothly or much worse. The first one is really identifying
who the leader is. You have too often two leaders inside of two different organizations that are leading marketing and you’re bringing them together. Someone has to be the captain. We’ve seen situations where it gets really emotional and it is emotional. People’s jobs are changing, things are getting complicated. But if you don’t identify a leader, then what happens is everything gets complicated because no one knows who’s leading.

We see specific examples where a company has purchased another company, new company to this has a different product or they’re in a different segment, or they do a different thing than the incumbent company. And they’re like, Hey, you don’t understand what we do. You don’t understand our customers, you understand our product, you understand any of these things. You can’t tell us that you’re going to know better than us how we have to serve. So defining who that captain is really important.

The second thing that we see is after you’ve identified that captain, you also have two marketing organizations that have a different hypothesis for how marketing should be serving the organization. Now, to take pause, when we talk about our hypothesis for marketing, we’re really talking about how marketing should be serving the organization based on your business model and your specific industry with your specific customers, with your specific competitors in your set. How should marketing be serving the organization?

And both of those hypotheses may or may not have been true in the past, but going forward, they may need to change. The merger acquisition may change the nature of the business. It may open a new segment. It could do a lot of different things. So the captain of the ship really needs to be thinking about what is the new philosophy for how marketing should be serving the organization and not making assumptions. We talk a lot about timeline and history meetings, going to that group, doing interviews, having conversations, understanding what’s been working for them, what hasn’t been working, what have they been dreaming to be able to do that they’ve never been able to do? What are their big ideas? What is the testing that they’ve been doing? Taking all of those learnings and having that ability to then decide how you want to deploy resources is really important.

I promise you, if you spend the time to slow down before you speed up, it will serve you much, much better in the long term.