[Tanaquil ChantrillParticipant]

Am curious if one has seen other objectives the deal teams need to strive to achieve beyond negotiating the sale price and sale terms.
The reason I ask is I have seen deal teams recommend terms and approaches that will hamper the success of the integration but because they are not incentivized for a successful integration since it is post-deal agreement, they tend to neglect recommendations and advice from the integration teams.

[Denise GingolaskiParticipant]

Hi Tanaquil – you make some great points. I think deal teams do need to have some other objectives besides just sale price and sale terms. Many times, the Finance department is chasing down information such as bank statements, fixed asset lists, revenue reconciliations, and contacts in the seller’s business to help with integration activity.

The deal team sees all of this information first and meets many of the key players in the sellers organization. They need to be responsible to bring that information to the integration team rather than have integration staff hunt it all down again. We’ve had many sellers tell us that they’ve already given that information to so-and-so. It’s ineffective to have the integration team ask for it again.

In the best case, it slows down the integration. In the worse case, it creates animosity between the buyer staff and the seller staff when they really should be working at building relationships.

[Mandana JavaheriParticipant]

In addition to to what Denise mentioned above, understanding the customer and channel partner base, their business model (whether it is direct or through channel partners, partner/customer incentives are also important

[Author]

Posts