Go-To-Market Integration Planning Part 2

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Where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during M and A deals. Welcome to M and A Science where leading M and A practitioners share lessons learned so we can learn from the best. If you're interested in keeping up with the latest from M and a science, visit mascience.com and subscribe to our free newsletter. Every week we share highlights of our interviews and invitations to events as we build the greatest community of forward thinking M and A practitioners. Again, that's mascience. Com. I'm your host Kisan Patel, CEO and founder of M&A Science. Joining me today is James Harris, Principal Corporate Development Integration at Google Google, multinational technology company that focuses on artificial intelligence, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e commerce and consumer electronics trade on NASDAQ under G O G L. Today we're going to talk more about go to market integration planning. James, welcome back. How are you?

Always good to see you Kisan. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation.

I'm so glad we bribed you to get you back so we can keep talking about more go to market stuff. Because the thing I'm getting a good sense of that when we do do a deal we don't want to screw that up.

It's a tough part and it's I'm a former engineer so I thought engineering was tough and then as I started getting into looking at how the go to market pieces are, it's considerably more complex. Finding really good go to market team members that have done this before. That is the key thing to always look for. Yes, you have an opportunity in your go to market tools and you get to do an M and A. I'd suggest it because once you know how to do this an amazing opportunity for you.

We're going to jump into it. If anybody wants to learn the background on James listen to one of the other podcasts we've already have published. It's a little funny because we've had some time since our last conversation so we aren't doing this back to back, but we may hopefully publish them back to back. Last time we spoke a lot of high level on shaping the thesis and initial planning approach around the Go to market integration. When we start clicking down into it, what does that look like? How are you thinking through front end, back end? What is that? How do you even think about it in general?

It's a multifaceted piece. The first piece I always think about is you always should be thinking about what's the customer journey, what is happening to those customers. I think that's that should always be a Go to North Star to go back to. As you think about these pieces pieces because there is a lot of complexity like how do I put two lead tracking tools together, how do I put two comp systems together, how do I put even merge two customer bases and salesforce pieces? I always go back to okay, let's put together a plan, let's think about how we do that, but then let's go back and think about how this experiences for the customers. The general other rules I've seen, and I've been on both sides of this a couple times, is as a customer that's worked with companies that have been acquired or emerging, I'm okay with seeing a little bit of duality for about a year because there's a lot of things that happen. So maybe I have to work with two sales forces or sign contracts or have two billing cycles. I feel like a year is okay. If you're taking more than a year, then as a customer I'm like did you really get this done right? But from a customer perspective, those are the outside pieces, the next pieces that you need to think through which are always challenging. What can you do right off the bat? You have two sales forces that are eager to work together. So how do you incent them and get them to be joint sales? There's usually an awful lot of immediate opportunity there and the more you can get both sales forces working together, there's also a magical moment of keeping both salesforces in play. You have two sales forces and they're not really working together and you have an us and them thing that just doesn't do very well. Some of that could be like joint lead passing joint sales calls. You need to think about how you incent both sales forces to sell and work together. I Think those are all tricky things. A lot of times companies will think about spiffs and spiffs are a great tool, but spiffs have some limitations. If you make a really big spiff, you're paying a lot of money for maybe what's a small transaction. If you make a really small spiff for joint deal, then you may be incenting people for something that they would have made a much bigger deal, much more upside on if they work together. That's kind of something to think through. The other piece that you have to think through is M and A doesn't come on nice calendar years. And so you have a like the existing Salesforce, that is the inbound company and you as host company have your own existing salesforce with plans, territories, quotas, all those lovely things and you can't just merge them at once. If you did that, it would be really disruptive because the odds of both territories mapping exactly the same, the odds of how you pay out on different kinds of sizes, that deals and transactions are probably going to be about zero, that they're going to exactly match. You have to think about how you operate in this interim phase until your next calendar year because you know sales cycles work always in annual processes. That's when everybody gets the quota and their territories and all those good things handed out. So if you're closing a deal or in the early half of the year, you've got some time to figure this out, you're closing it in the last half of the year. You have to make a real quick decision. Do I do it like in the first year I'm closing a deal in Q4 or the softly tight. Can I do everything to merge Salesforce together or do I have to wait a whole year? This drives some pretty big strategic thinking that you have to think around of. What does that mean if we keep the SalesForces separate for 18 months? That would be maybe the most extreme. What does that mean as far as joint sales? What does that mean? Back to that customer experience. So you have to play these out very early to think through what's best for you from the customer's perspective, what's best for you from the revenue driving perspective, and then what's best for how fast your systems and tools can adopt to do that. Some companies I've seen have amazing great onboarding processes so that they could actually take a company in Q4 and map it all in and have it all together and then have joint sales in one quarter. But most companies, this is not a core set of competencies and I think it takes a little bit of time to build up the tools and the people and the know how to do that.

There's this customer journey that paints the picture. You have your actual sales team getting people oriented to wanting to work together and aligned and some of the things around that with the alignment financially, the comp and so forth, and then driving it operationally, the technology and figuring that part out as its own track as well.

Yeah, marrying all three back to the people and the salesforce. After doing several interact integrations and the company and working with a regular salesforce, the head of sales said, just think about the sales team as anytime you touch my territory or your commission, you're messing with my food bowl. I think it's right because it's, look, this is how I make my living and if you're changing all those things, you're really impacting how I make my living. Back to that key sales piece. Because the salesforce, they're the ones that are going out and finding the customer. They're the ones that are winning the deals. So you do have to work very closely with them. So you feel like that they're getting more food in their food bowl, not taking any food out.

That's a fair point. What do you do to do that?

So I've seen a couple things. I mentioned spiffs. A spiff is a cash incentive that is paid out if the two sales forces work to close a deal jointly. So there's a kind of a qualification point where you know, hey, company A, inbound company and post company identified customer A. Now we've engaged, we created a joint opportunity and then we said, okay, we're going to joint go out and sell and we sell and close the deal. Then both sales teams get, you know, the regular commissions on whatever parts of the joint pieces. Company A, inbound company got some commission and host company got some commission, but they both get a cash intent on top of it. And that does work depending on the size of the transaction and the volume. Sometimes spiffs work really well. They're very large curated deals. Fists are hard to set the right spiff because some of these deals can be very expensive or very lucrative from the sales perspectives. And so you have to kind of get the right incentives and back to the sales team. Some of them will be like, I can make X dollars on my spiff or I can wait till it's in my territory and then I can get full compensation and I get quote quota relief and I can get extra kickers on oftentimes salesforces have extra kickers to sell new products. So sometimes there's a little bit of gaming system from the salesforce to wait so that they can maximize the return on the sale. So you have to be thoughtful about that. And actually and I think having a really good partner in the sales organization where you can sit down and say hey, what our strategy is, will that work? How will it be gained in a positive or negative way? Having those kind of scenarios thought through is really important sometimes special work. I've actually seen some companies just say I'll give double comp. So if the inbound team and the host team both sell products, they both get each other's commissions. So you get double commission. And you know that's a very bold move because it's pretty expensive. You definitely have a very highly incentive joint sales force who work together selling the same product.

How does that work? Double commission. If they sell their product, you just get their commission and then vice versa.

So you're paying twice. So if I sell example is if I sell widget A and I get my commission is $5 and keep it really simple and then the host company is selling widget B and that commission is $10. So if I'm the salesperson in the host company, I get paid $10 and the target company gets paid $5. But by double competing them, both of them would get $15.

Oh wow.

So it is very expensive from just your cash outlay. But you certainly have a lot of people incentive. Then you, particularly the inbound company, it's hey, I just tripled my commission. Where that works really well is if you're trying to establish a customer base. Once you've done that you can build a and this kind of gets back to your deal thesis models. Maybe you want to think about that's a lot of cost to acquire customers. But once you've acquired those customers then you have upsell opportunities, cross sell opportunities, a lot of those things. So it gets into some real key say financial and corporate strategy that you have to think through. And I would say this sort of on the low end, double compass on the high end. And then sometimes you can find some other ways to find graduated incentives in between. But those are the two bookends that you see often being used. So double compass kind of a little unusual of a candidate.

What about the customers? What are you doing with them throughout this? Do you engage with them? Do you get their.

How do you. The first one is you really need to reach out to all customers immediately and at the Close of the deal and say, hey, we're excited about this. Set some expectations. Like every transaction that's going forward will continue. There's no changes because a lot of times people are like, oh wait a minute, did I just negotiate this great agreement? Now the host company is going to come in and say change all the terms. I think that's really important to communicate that it's business as usual because you want your customer base to have good security. Every transaction that I've gotten of any substance or size, I think it's really important to have both companies call down on key accounts and just do that personal outreach. I've seen it with the host company doing a call and then the inbound company doing a call. I think that works. I think it's really nice to see both salesforces call at the same time because it's a rejoin for together. There's definitely a key call down for major accounts, key accounts in flight that I think are really important to do. And then I think it's just being really transparent and open with the customer base. Hey, until date X or Y or Z for two companies, the products will be working together. We're working together on the products. But you may have two billing cycles, you may have two separate contracts just being completely transparent and open with the customer. So there's no surprises. It's just the best path.

Okay, get the communication. I like the approaches that you outlined with really being able to engage with that and then probably recapping the narrative on why this is going to be great for everybody. The mechanical parts.

Oh, mechanical parts. No. 2 companies I've ever seen probably done something like 100 transactions, have a complete one to one mapping. When you even call the same customer it can be something like I'll just pick on Boeing. There could be Boeing, there could be the Boeing company, there could be Boeing Inc. And their Salesforce systems. And each one of those threes would be very valid customer identifications. But you now have mapped the host company's definitions with whatever the target company used. That's like a general deep mapping exercise that you really have to have very quickly so that you're using the same language. And some cases you may have different contacts within the company and that's totally great and fine. But you may actually have two different ways of calling the company in your internal sales tracking systems that you need to make sure align. And that is always a first order business. Make sure you've got a matching so that when you talk to them you start using the same language. Or and it's also a first step towards at some point the inbound contracts will get merged with the host company's contracts. So there's a contract conversion period of time that you have to think about moving off the inbound company's paper to the host company's paper. No acquiring company has ever been happy with an inbound company's firms and conditions and things like that. Because oftentimes it's a bigger company with a smaller company and the bigger company has a different set of risk criteria or profiles. Or there can be even simple things like some Companies will be net 30 and others will be net 60 as far as payments. So you have to start beginning to align those key mechanics around how you work with the customer and setting those principles up very early. And then when you do sales, when you start converting the customers over to your paper, those are bigger nitty issues.

I feel like we're limiting our scope here because there's a broader sense of go to market that would incorporate your quote to cash, your client success, your marketing. We'll have separate podcast interviews for each of those.

Those are all very deep conversations and I understand the big pieces but yeah, making sure quote to cash systems really connect and work in the same tools. Those are really highly specialized knowledge bases and understanding.

Okay. The one thing I wanted to get a better understanding was with the sellers. Right. We want to keep them happy. We have some financial incentives but on the operational side we're looking for that right time to do a cutover and to merge the actual CRMs together. There's probably a lot of training and things around that. So that might not happen in a very controlled way. It's gotta be planned well.

Yes.

Or I should say it's not going to happen in an impulsive manner. Going to be well planned out. What about the sellers? They're trying to run cross sells and things of that sort. They don't want to bump head on customers and things. Are they sitting there with two laptops? How do you figure out the solution.

For the time being at the front end? It is Friend of mine affectionately refer to it as a three legged sales call. You have two salespeople going in together and and jointly working with both products and jointly pitching both products at the same time. So you almost have double team until you get to a common quote system, a common lead to cash quote fulfillment system. You have to operate that way and you're spot on about that. Has to be very thoughtful in its planning and execution because you have to think about how you're going to make the merge the two systems and then make some transitional cutovers as far as you are touching with the sales tools and sales processes and quotes and approvals and all those lovely workflows that you have to then merge into one. Most of the time it usually is post companies goals. Although there's been several times where I've looked at inbound companies and we've learned some unique ways of how they have engaged with the customers that. Oh, you borrow from that. So there's a little bit of a rationalization of two business practices that you have to go through. Does take time. Most of these lead to cash systems. Those Transitions usually are 6, 12, 18, 24 months. Six is really for a very small company and maybe a small number of. Small number of leads. That's about the fastest I've ever seen it done.

Wouldn't you be inclined to try to get it done as quick as you can?

You do want to move as fast as you can. The key piece there is making sure that you identify dedicated resources to the transition from both teams. The challenge is that oftentimes operational teams have been leaned out or to get as efficient and financially physical as possible. And so you have two very lean teams trying to do three things at once. Inbound company sales and tools, host company sales and tools. And now we have to merge. So oftentimes that does require some investing and resources and teams to do that work. If you're a serial acquirer, you definitely that's a core set of competences that you want to build up and you want to have an onboarding team that does that think that through and oftentimes some very high level cases. I think Cisco's in a marvel at this is they have an onboarding team that thinks constantly about how to take in companies, bring them into their systems incredibly fast so that transition goes really quick. But they've invested a lot into that process and they've built their systems from the ground up. For that intake perspective, which I think is also sometimes a bit of an overhaul from an infrastructure perspective that you have to make that investment, I think that's a really key piece. Particularly if you're doing a lot of serial acquisitions of companies that have inbound revenue streams. If you're at deals and you're just tucking them in, that's a different kind of. It's a lot less complex.

How do you do that? How do you balance the assumptions to your ability to actually execute?

The reality has been it starts out in theory and then it's always Hard to prove until you've done a first few deals, first few transactions and then everybody sees. Ooh, this is a lot more complex to me the value of post close reviews. How did things work? Where could we have done better? Those are incredibly instrumental in building the case for the investment core infrastructure team. For the first few times you do it, you really have to think about how do you build a repeatable process. In some ways it's like just core M and A. Anytime you're adding new things, new changes to your business, you have to build out an M and A team. To address these in an M and A systems integration team is incredibly important. You can augment it sometimes with contractors and consultants if it's just arms and legs and heavy lifting. But you still have to have this core knowledge of your core businesses systems and the why you built them that way. That's incredibly important. Getting to the how and doing can be things that you can maybe bring in extra help, but really understanding the core whys because they're often driven with deep seated business legal compliance rationale that you just have to be very acutely aware of.

These post close reviews we know oftentimes turn into more items to add to the checklist. Basically yes. What other things can you do to help retain knowledge? Any other specific deliverables or assets?

There's two things there. It's a great one to keep in mind. Oftentimes that team, if you're investing in a series of program managers and engineers and systems analysis people, you can keep that team for key business transformation efforts too. Sometimes you may be wanting to upgrade your core backend ERP systems. So that's the same team. You can use that same team, that same knowledge, that same skillset. I think that's one way to help justify it when you're not doing a lot of deals the other way. And I'm a huge fan of this. If you're doing fairly episodic transactions, but they're very large or you're just building up that knowledge base. Tabletop exercises and some companies we just as we knew we needed to build it, but we didn't. We were building but the pipeline wasn't there yet. We ran quarterly deal scenarios. We picked a company that we thought was interesting. Oftentimes we picked the first one. I always recommend pick a softball just to run through the process and make sure you figure out how it can work and then start picking some that are like maybe multiple regions. Multiple regions always adds a whole nother complexity because you're contracting in multiple Languages, you have different entities sometimes that you have to serve the contracts out of. So that just adds another layer of complexity, maybe layer in that you're going to keep 80% of the company and end of life 20%. So now you have an acquisition and a divestiture or a wind down. How would you do all those things? Think about your joint integration sales motions. Is this the add on? Like you're selling A and B and it makes better customer experience or is it truly a merger? Because those are different points that you want to think through. You may have two products at one point. You're selling them separately and you're selling them together, but eventually they fold into one. How do you think about that? Customer migration and change Start simple. When you run into an area like, ooh, that was really scary to me, that's the one that I want to do the next tabletop exercise on. Because. Because then you're just like, it does two things. One, figure out what you need to do. Two, it takes the fear out of whatever that was so that you'd be ready for it the next time.

That's pretty cool. Hopefully marketing picks that up. We can write a little play out of it.

Yeah, we run a lot of tabletop exercises here at Google just to test the systems or test the process.

I like that a lot. On the tabletop exercise. Can we walk through that in just like a, step by step? How would you walk through that in terms of doing the prep, who do you have involved and the steps?

There's kind of two levels of this tabletop exercise that I would think about. There's one is high level deal capacity. We wanted to think about doing deals this way kind of tabletop exercise. And then I'd say there's another kind of tabletop exercise that I really want to exercise in extreme a certain work stream or a certain set of processes. Both of them have their cases. For the first one, the best way to do this is create a fake company and say we're going to buy. And I usually give it a code name just like everything else. And that's here's the company, here's the product, here's the revenue, here's the number of entities. Just kind of like the basic high level things you get in an early due diligence session and then say, and then we're going to take it and put it in product area A and maybe product area B. And then you have your E cross functional team members, you know, your people from finance, accounting, legal, hr, all the different kind of Core domains and you say what information would you need that you need more of? Let's figure that out. Where do you see immediate risks that would give you concerns? And where do you see that there's like easy things you could be doing? And spend some time just making sure you're identifying those things. And then the next question is what do you do about those? Ideally I want us not have more questions on the due diligence list, but I want to ask is this the follow? Do we have a follow on diligence session to have a deep dive around? Like how does this work? Do we set up a meeting where we have these conversations and what would that agenda look like? Whatever I would do for those meta ones is like test poor assumptions. Some companies acquire technology and shut it down and then refold it in. So what would happen if we didn't shut it down? We wanted to keep the product in market for a period of time. Pick the converse of whatever your normal operations are. Pick one, maybe two, and that way you can test those edges. Oftentimes your sponsors are already testing those edges or asking those questions. So they said, well, could we do like three deals at once and do a string of pearls strategy? That's a good question. So do a tabletop exercise. What would happen if we did three deals at once and we wanted to combine it into one product? That's worth thinking through. So the other one would be more of that, like the go to market function in particular, we're buying a subscription product, it's billed annually, it has these kinds of add ons that can be done and those kinds of structure. Maybe those are things that you just don't do. Maybe you're doing capacity building or maybe you just do a site license, ask that question and then say, how would we build the system? What would it take to build those systems? What would break if we did this and really spend the time testing that all the way out so that when somebody says, okay, you're a site license company and now you want to go into the subscription business, we can do it, but it means these things. We have to invest in these things. We have to get a team in to build that infrastructure. I often mine the things that didn't go so well. What would we do better next time? Okay, we all agree that we didn't do a great job of account mapping. How would we do that differently and really game it all the way out? But yeah, great fictitious companies be very careful because sometimes those can create internal rumors. Don't make them look too Much like one company because everybody likes to figure out if that a real deal or not a real deal.

Where it is, is there any anything takeaways, any like things that are produced out of it? Any little steps to this?

I insist that there's always a new practice rewritten or a new process or a new set of functions that we need to develop or create. In some cases we've recognized that oh wow, we could actually bring whole parts of the due diligence process that we do maybe post close in early if we ask these right questions. We set up this kind of detailed conversation. So I always insisted in some form of, I want to say integration toolbox artifact being created that is like a process change or a new set of tools or a new set of cross functional team specs requirements, those things. And then we say we created this. Now in the next two to three deals that fit this criteria, we're going to use it. So we'll just actively know was it the right thing to do or not the right thing to do.

Yeah. Who's all involved with this?

For the core ones, I usually bring in my cross functional leads, the directors of the different teams. Although in some cases they volunteer their junior members because it's a good way for them to get up to speed without having to do a deal. So it can be both ways. If you're going into a deep area of jointly pass or any of those things, bring in the domain experts, don't make those plays super long. I usually set up a hypothetical, give people a day or two because it's stimulating a deal to internalize whatever it is. And then one or two working sessions that are maybe an hour or two where we can get something, go at it, figure it out, write up some action items, try to build some artifacts, maybe meet back in a couple days to finish those artifacts or test them out and then move on. I don't want to take teams out of the field for very long at all because I think it should be something that you can do maybe over the course of a few weeks.

Yeah, I was going to ask like time and frequency. So you would say two weeks. And how many times are you meeting in a two week period?

Two, three times maybe, depending on what it is. Usually the first meeting is a couple hours because you're laying out the case, you're laying out the piece pieces and there's usually a good set of Q A that either you have the answer or you have to make a pop on the fly so that everybody knows what the rules are. Then have a couple working sessions and a couple kind of circle backs. I don't really like to like put people in a room for a week and then come out with something that just, that's just too disruptive.

And then you got a couple more sessions and then you create these things. How many times a year would you do this exercise?

Depends on deal volume. If you have active streams, it's hard to do this. If you've got like a trough, definitely put one or two in that period. If you got a quarter like in some businesses, you don't do transactions in Q4 because you just can't just everything is an all hands on deck kind of thing. That's a great time to do it. I try to at least run one or two. I know we do a lot of deals here at Google a year, just pick one or two scenarios and run them.

I want to go back to the sales team and making sure they're actually aligned to go to market together. How do you test that out and get a sense of the readiness?

It's a tough question because there's an interesting intersection because oftentimes product management is driving these kind of ideas or transactions. So in some ways that's like in theory, adding these two teams together will be great, but in practice that may not be so hot. They just have different sales actions or they just work with customers very differently is a really good opportunity. I've talked to other people outside of Google and encouraging them to think about the same issues. Doesn't hurt to partner with these types of companies beforehand because if you're partnering then you're doing joint selling and you're doing joint customer engagement. And if you really are partnering and you're working well and your customers really like working with both of you, that's a pretty good sign that you'll not have that friction. Or if you can't partner, then you start looking at okay, what customers do we know both teams are working in already? You can't always get the inbound companies pre close customer list, but you can do a little sleuthing around and see, oh yeah, that other company is in the same accounts as ours. And just ask how do you like working with them? A good salesperson can always ask a lot of good questions and get a lot of information. That's the way to kind of figure out and test it is tough. It's risk one of my sales friends refers to as whale hunting. And then there's farming. If you're going after these big huge accounts and that's your culture, but the other company is like farming. That's a big difference as far as just sales motions and sales activities. Just watch for those kinds of big deltas. If that's the case, then I would raise my hand as an integration person and say they do things really different. We need to think that through maybe, right? Because maybe we need to do well hunting and farming. But you need to be very mindful that's what you're doing.

That's one that you have to dig into and really have a qualitative view to understand that that's going to work out. Right. Just look at the CRM data and.

Actually the customer support data sometimes is also not a bad place to go look because how many customer cases do you work that are your customer support team is working and that product shows up in your customer support cases. Now it could be a good thing or a bad thing, but you do get some data there.

The team you developed to do integration sort of had the broad integration plan and team, but specifically for making sure go to market doesn't get screwed up. How do you build that go to market integration Dream team?

You definitely need dedicated people. And the reason I say for go to market you need to dedicate it from the strategy perspective and then you need to think about defining that interim execution. And then they need to understand your systems really in depth so that you know what you can do in flex. Because if you're building something and you say oh, we'll do the front end integration, so maybe we're doing joint quoting together, but the back end systems are separate and we stitch it back together again using spreadsheets or data exchanges. Really understanding the limits. Having a technical systems backend lead to cache component of that GTM dream team is really important. And then I'd say the whole other area here is the lead to cash generation, which we haven't talked much about. It's the marketing side. How do they reach out and contact the customers? Is it sales conferences? Is it on site visits? What drives sales motion there? And really understanding that you want to make sure that both marketing machines are working well together and not sending mixed messages. How do you make sure the inbound team is incenting people to go look at the host company and the host company is incenting people to go look at inbound team. Because oftentimes you still have two websites, you still have two sales conferences, you may even have user groups, all those great things. You really need to make sure you're doing as much cross pollination as possible. And that takes really creative marketing people to think about how do we tune our message so it's us instead of them plus us, the big we. I should say fair point.

So we want some dedicated resources in those areas that can pick up front end, back end within our sales cycle.

The other piece there is because that whole value chain from lead to cash and actually bulk booking and financial reporting is very detailed. You need to cultivate a series of subject matter expertise in those. Each domain. That whole value chain that goes through the organization that are M and A prepared is the way I would say this so that they understand what M and A is. They understand that, you know it's going to come in sideways. They're going to going to be people that are interested in solving problems and looking for solutioning. So you're building up that cohort of resources that you can tap. When you say, hey, you do monthly subscriptions, this is annual subscriptions, is that going to cause a big difference as far as products having a see that you can say, oh no, that's not. That's just a field in a database to oh no, that triggers all these other things down the road. Having those resources are just incredibly important even in the early scoping stage, because you still may be deciding to buy the company because of a lot of synergies from the business and technology perspective and customer experience. But that operational friction, it's good to highlight that early so that people understand, so that it's not assumed that it will be a slam dunk.

You make all this sound way too easy, my friend. Oh no.

There's a lot of questions. I would say that there's a lot of eagerness to do the right thing, a lot of excitement to try to bring things in. I think the piece there is assets going forward have to have a sense of optimism because you want to keep people working towards it. You have to inject a sense of what I would refer to as healthy skepticism of have we done that? Have we tested that? Those are nice ways to just make sure there aren't surprises or getting a little bit more detail around it. I think is really important. This is a devil's in the details workflow that you just have to either have those people that you can kind of answer them really quick, or you have to go back and test or back to tabletop exercises or even simulations. Just is that even possible? Because I think there's always an optimism. Sure, it's possible. Okay, so show me how would that work? And sometimes that helps, particularly in the tabletop exercises. Just sort those things out where it's like, oh, gee, I thought that would work really well. But when we did that, it broke all these things down here downstream that we just didn't think about because they're usually very complex systems. Anytime somebody says, oh, we'll do it right away, I'm like, who's saying we're doing it right away? And do we have the right people in the room that can actually do that? Because sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. I think it's just really important to make sure you're really testing that like that.

Healthy skepticism. What's the best advice you have for execution of all this?

Well, for going back to the go to market component, remember your customer. Think about what you're doing to the customer. Your internal difficulty should not be exposed to the customer. I guess the other kind of key piece is there may be duct tape and baling wire as you stitched all these things together, but the customer should never see that.

All right, stay focused on the customer.

Think about it. You've proven the product, you've negotiated the price, and then it's like a really difficult thing to get the product in and set and using it. Boy, that's. Yeah, don't do that. That's all the mechanics that go to market lead to cash infrastructure.

So do you find like, undo moments where you did something and had to undo it?

We have run into some cases where you've thought you, your joint marketing or your ad campaigns were going to be the right ones and they just fell on deaf ears. Then, yeah, you've got to regroup and rethink that and reset it really quick. That can trickle all the way back up to, you know, your deal thesis. We're expecting to make X dollars in the first quarter and couldn't get their attention then. Boy, we need to think about, you know, now we're X in the hole. We need to think about what that means. Or does that mean that there's a pivot that you have to think through? Is that a pivot in messaging? Is that a pivot and target customers? Those are all questions I think you have to rethink. The ultimate horribly painful thing is, did you buy the wrong thing? That sometimes happens. And the question then is, when you stop testing, realize you bought the wrong thing. I think that's a tough balance.

James, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M and A?

I will say, and this is 11 years ago, I come back to it even today. It was a company that we brought in because we wanted to do due diligence and it was a good sized company. We brought them all in to have a series of conversations for a week and it was the first time the entire company had ever been in the same room. They had all worked remote today, that's new and novel or not novel. I was all primed to do all the due diligence meetings and have these conversations and it was realized they have to get it out of their system that they need to talk to. Saying, oh, you're much taller than you are. I didn't know about this and almost socialized for a bit. I gave them an hour to just go socialize, just get this out of your system and then we'll go back and do our business. These the piece that was most interesting that they had been fronting themselves very well in English, but most of them were not native English speakers because they were using translation software because it was all remote. So when we got into the room, we had to give time for things to get written in translation software so that we could get the answer because there was just a language barrier there that you didn't see in email exchanges or in chat session because they were really good at. It was a surprising moment.

That was a surprise for you.

Yeah, complete surprise. We were like on to moving and I'm like, okay, I gotta let him socialize. It's great. And then I realized two of the really great engineers and they brought them in, didn't speak very good English natively, but they could understand it. They could understand the question, but just they were very conscious of. Yep. It took them a while to get conscious of the grammar and that's an interesting surprise. Yeah.

Thank you so much again for taking the time. You're helping me become a better M and A scientist. What more could I ask for?

It's always fun to talk with you and I always appreciate these conversations because they reminds me that we really need to get this information out to the larger groups. These are hard problems to solve and they're not new. We just need to learn from each other.

Hey, that's where all M and A science is all about. Thank you for donating your time to this cause and those of you still listening. Thank you. Till next time. Here's to the deal.

Foreign.

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