With respect to mergers and acquisitions, what are the steps and priorities you take to integrate the newly acquired product into your overall product marketing strategy?

This one is challenging because I’ve witnessed year long integrations from newly acquired products into the overall strategy, and even then, it wasn’t “fully” absorbed into the main strategy. First, I would recommend looking at the reasons why this product came under the fold. What was the vision and use cases of how it connects? Sometimes it's for strategic reasons, sometimes it’s to complement the product. Understanding the why will help with the how. Then, I would analyze the target segment f ...Read More

I’m so glad to have been asked this question, because I’ve been fortunate enough to lead teams through acquisitions at almost every company I’ve worked at. In order to effectively integrate the newly acquired company into yours, you’ll need to understand what drove the acquisition: was it a strategic, product or acqui-hire? It sounds like your question is referring to a product buy. In that case, you’ll need to develop a deep understanding of the new product itself, as well as the audience, so y ...Read More

Great question! My advice would be to remember the product stage is likely quite different than your existing product. For the new product, prioritize product market fit PMM tasks during the initial integration roll out. Steps to do this: Conduct a TAM analysis with products like Crossbeam to understand overlapping base and eligible customers for GTM. Conduct listening tours to understand target audience and personas. Build new personas and train + enable the team on target audience. Use tiering ...Read More

Excellent question. I would start listening to the newly acquired company's customers. Go on a lsitening tour. Understand the buyer and user's pains, challenges, wins, why they love your product, what's missing, how they measure success. From that, you'll be able to start mapping these new key challenges and value props to the ones already in place. From that, updating your messaging doc. Your pitch decks.  Oh - and then the pricing and packaging work starts :) and enablement. I know - it's a lo ...Read More

There are different approaches to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and their impact on partnerships, and strongly depend on the acquiring company and strategy. Below are a few examples from my experience. At one company, the rationale for acquiring a business was to gain the customer base and therefore the need to promote an integration was not a priority. At another company, the rationale for acquiring the business was the synergy of the technology and team, and therefore, the team started ou ...Read More