Mergers and Acquisitions: how to stop them killing sales

Mergers and acquisitions usually go wrong, maybe that’s why they are a subject so beloved of business schools.

Examples abound: EBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005 and wrote its value down to $1.2 billion a year later; Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler for $36 billion and sold it nine years later for $7.4 billion; Cisco paid $590 million for Pure Digital Technologies and closed it down two years later.

These are case studies from which business school professors draw conclusions about lack of synergy, culture clash and flawed integration management.

We argue that there’s a more prosaic factor at work in many of these failures – mergers and acquisitions fail because the process is allowed to kill sales. This article explains why this happens and what to do to make sure it doesn’t happen to you.

Give us your contact details in the form below and we'll email the article to you straight away.