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4 quotes from 1 episode on M&A Science, each with a timestamped link to the source.
John McMahon states that successful acquisitions install leaders with specific domain and stage experience over the acquired teams. BMC doubled average sales productivity to $2.23 million by making the acquired company's executive the chief revenue officer for the entire combined business.
Cisco damaged an enterprise software acquisition by placing a political manager with only hardware experience in charge of a startup team.
“Cisco did it wrong. They took someone that had never been in a startup like a GeoTel, someone that had never sold software. The person had only sold routers for Cisco in the early days. Someone that was super politically oriented, not revenue oriented.”
Venture capitalists without operating backgrounds often force identical business templates across completely different portfolio companies.
“Then there's the venture capitalists who believe that they know what business they're in, but some of them haven't been in an operating role…”
BMC acquired BladeLogic and recognized the target possessed better sales talent. The company installed John McMahon as chief revenue officer over 400 representatives, doubling average productivity to $2.23 million within twelve months.
“BMC did it completely different than Cisco did. They did it maybe in an unorthodox way. So when they took over BladeLogic, they recognized that the BladeLogic salesforce was superior to their salesforce. So what they did is they took me and put me in charge as a CRO for all of BMC.”
Post-merger integrations require stage-specific operating knowledge. Smart chief executive officers assemble boards with outside domain experts to mentor functional leaders in sales, marketing, finance, and engineering.
“In the best boards that I've seen, the CEOs are very smart and they typically understand that they're not able to mentor every one of the disciplines at the C-level on their executive team…”
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