Ready to accelerate your post-M&A operations with a go-to-market (GTM) post-merger integration checklist?
Merging two companies is a complex process. Marketing plays an important role in making it successful. Any merger and acquisition (M&A) transaction changes not only how a company operates, but also how it presents itself to the market.
Mergers can be disruptive. It’s important to clearly communicate with customers, employees, and partners to ensure business continuity. Additionally, you’ll want to ensure you’ve created a cohesive marketing plan that covers attribution, tech stacks, and pricing.
Despite uncertainty in the M&A markets over the past couple of years, the experts at PWC believe that we’re due for an M&A rebound. That means marketing leaders should stay ready to deal with the complexities of an M&A integration process.
This GTM post-merger integration checklist is designed to help you deal with the marketing aspects of the transaction, from messaging to CRMs to customer upsells. Let’s get into it.
GTM Post-Merger Integration Checklist
Here are seven tips for marketing a merger:
- Define your new brand messaging.
- Develop a unified marketing plan and timeline.
- Prepare internal communications strategies.
- Communicate the news to your audience.
- Compose updates to company websites and social media profiles.
- Consolidate GTM tech stacks.
- Identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
1. Define your new brand messaging
Oftentimes, acquiring a new company will change the way your business operates. You might create new product value props, cater to new audiences, or even redefine the vision and mission of your new entity. It’s important to bring together your leadership team to define what your company wants to be, do and say.
We recommend conducting a messaging hierarchy exercise, which will help you produce a brand messaging framework that everyone can align on.
2. Develop a unified marketing plan and timeline
Now it’s time to marry your product vision with your marketing strategy. Work on developing a strategic marketing plan that incorporates the best practices and expertise from both companies. This may involve merging teams, consolidating marketing tech stacks, and reallocating resources.
You’ll want to assess your entire go-to-market strategy. You may want to change how you approach certain lead generation tactics, such as content production or paid advertising. If both marketing departments were using different attribution models, you’ll have to blend or align those. Overall, you’re deciding how your new-look marketing department will operate.
In this stage, you’ll also want to set a date for announcing the news of the merger.
This ties into establishing an implementation timeline. Usually after an M&A, there is a grace period where things aren’t integrated and people are operating in their status quo. From a marketing perspective, you don’t want to break what is working as you figure out how to integrate. But sometimes, leaders allow this to go on for too long, and the integration process is stunted. Having a strong strategy, plan, and timeline to execute is important.
3. Prepare internal communications strategies
Employees should be notified directly of the merger or acquisition before they find out on their own. Any M&A could bring changes to their team structure, payroll, benefits, and more.
Consider how you plan to share this news with your teams. Use your newly-defined messaging hierarchy to achieve consistency.
4. Communicate the news to your audience
The worst thing you can do in an acquisition is have your customers feel neglected. During any M&A, there is going to be change but you don’t want your customers to feel that early on. Sharing the news with them as early and as humanly as possible is really important to set the tone that this M&A will not be disruptive for them
You should plan on some combination of crafting a traditional press release, pitching the story to media outlets, writing emails to customers, and prepping social media content.
This is a big moment! Make sure you’re repurposing and distributing the news across all of your channels to capture your audience’s attention. Also, reach out to existing customers multiple times about the news, as they might miss a one-time email.
5. Compose updates to company websites and social media profiles
Be sure to prepare updates of any public-facing company profiles with your new mission statement, company boilerplate, or other marketing essentials. This includes the big-name socials (LinkedIn, X, TikTok, etc) as well as profiles such as Crunchbase or G2. But remember: don’t update anything publicly until your launch date. I’ve seen mistakes from folks scheduling blogs in advance, only to have dates changed at the last minute.
Do the same with your company website(s). Are you merging the sites under one roof, or keeping them separate? Will you build a landing page that describes the benefits of the merger? Plan these activities well in advance, as creating or updating a website can be a long process.
6. Consolidate GTM tech stacks
During the M&A process, GTM teams have to combine their tech stacks just as a product team would.
Understanding the performance of the new entity will come down to clean reporting, which is really hard to do if your GTM tech stack is completely different. Having a plan and an architect for this will be crucial. Here’s where collaboration between your GTM and finance personnel is key.
If you’re opting to merge your GTM functions, you’ll want to consolidate customer databases within your CRM to ensure accuracy and consistency. This may involve some cross-platform data migration (for example: if you use HubSpot but the acquired company was running on Salesforce). While this may take some effort upfront, it will help reduce duplicate data entry in the long term.
7. Identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities
Analyze the product portfolios of the incoming companies to locate opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, and bundling. Landing on the right pricing and packaging strategies can help ensure that current service remains intact while providing opportunities to acquire new customers.
Navigating an M&A integration process is typically tricky, but we hope this marketing post-merger integration checklist helps simplify the GTM aspects of your merge. If you’re looking for help with the product and finance sides of the M&A process, be sure to download our Post-M&A Integration Bundle for more expert insights.
