Accelerating M&A Integration

For Cisco, integrating as soon as possible after acquiring a company is a must. This is not an easy task, as acquirers must execute quickly and efficiently, navigate changes, and preserve the target company's value. In this article, Caroline Jones, Senior Director - Acquisition Success at Cisco, shares their processes on how to accelerate M&A integration. 

"It doesn't matter how quickly we accelerate the execution on our side. We could have offers and products ready to be sold, but it takes the go-to-market teams being ready for integration to be successful." - Caroline Jones

Accelerating M&A integration planning

Before Cisco commits to a deal, they consider what the integration would entail. Knowing the strategy behind the integration helps their team identify the following:

1. What to preserve in the target company 
2. What are the integration risks
3. What are the plans to address the risks
4. What are the costs required to achieve the expected synergies

Having those kinds of solutions on paper is crucial to understand the implications and the requirements moving forward. The idea is to be able to execute immediately after announcing the deal. 

The integration team becomes involved as soon as Cisco’s corporate development team decides to move forward with the deal. Everyone must align with the integration's strategy, even at a high-level, including their COO and CFO. 

In parallel, they have a COO commitment process to align with operations and a CFO commitment process to get final approval. Therefore, they must have a pre-approved team in place that is ready to execute on day one. 

Approaching the target company

During diligence, the target company can become overwhelmed by different teams asking for large amounts of information. Also, this often results in redundant questions that will waste time and cause burnout. Cisco uses a pillar model that utilizes broad organizations instead of functional teams, which includes: 

• Operational requirements team
• Customer excellence requirements team 
• Legal, Tax, and Finance team 
• HR team 
• Go-to-market team 

They have these primary teams to do the diligence work and cross-share information with other functions to avoid redundancies. The pillar model also simplifies the functional model and makes understanding the target company easier. 

Accelerating M&A integration execution

The execution team needs to have experience. The leadership team must also help and anticipate roadblocks during integration so that the execution team can address them as quickly as possible.

Lastly, it doesn't matter how quickly the integration team can execute their plan if the go-to-market team is not ready for the integration. Ensure that the sales team is prepared to sell by providing the right incentives and tools to set them up for success. 

Success tips

To accelerate the pace of integration, everyone must learn from past deals. Whether it's an in-house deal or someone else's deal, understand what went wrong and what went right. 

The most successful integrations focus on the people side of the transaction. Many things don't show up on diligence and can only be identified by forming relationships with the target company.