Today’s guest highlights the importance of trust, empathy, and understanding in fostering meaningful experiences in the workplace. He also discusses the keys to successful acquisitions, how to avoid common mistakes by acquirers, and how to create post-acquisition strategy.

Anthony Webb is a mergers & acquisitions lifer, licensed lawyer, venture capital investor, servant leader, and engaged father.

Currently, he works in Corporate Development and M&A Integration for Adobe.

Anthony shares what makes work most meaningful to him, from being given the opportunity to solve complex problems, to building great team environments, to driving tangible results by empathizing with others, understanding their objectives, and providing supportive leadership.

Through a personal experience, Anthony illustrates how creating safe spaces allows trust to be built, in turn paving the way for effective communication. To empower your organization’s “culture carriers,” it is vital to create a space where ideas from both sides can come to the table, promoting innovation and better decision-making.

Asked what goes into a successful M&A, Anthony unpacks the concept of excellent end-to-end execution. It starts with creating a crisp corporate strategy, followed by homing into the target space, then getting the right people to the table for diligence, and, finally, building an integration strategy and approach.

Anthony explains that divesting businesses gave him a new perspective that allowed him to understand what to look for in an acquisition. Drawing from these experiences, he provides insight into the often unpleasant surprises that occur during acquisitions and offers strategies on how to avoid them, chief among them being the consequences of being overly optimistic and simplistic in a deal.

Anthony discusses the importance of knowledge retention and being sensitive to the motivations of the target company's employees. Building trust and openness, according to him, leads to better acquisition outcomes.

Anthony shares how simply attending routine meetings of the acquired company during a several-month "stabilization period"—allowing all voices to bring ideas to the table—allows acquirers to learn and gain more value from the acquisition for the long-term.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Anthony Webb:

● LinkedIn

Colleen Francis provides a proven, realistic gameplan to creatively adapt our sales and marketing efforts in a topsy-turvy world.

Colleen is an award-winning speaker, consultant, and the author of Right on the Money: New Principles for Bold Growth.

A successful sales leader for over 20 years, Colleen’s results have attracted hundreds of industry-leading clients, including Chevron, John Deere, NCR, Trend Micro, Merck, Abbott, Experian, Royal Bank, and Dow.

Colleen is a recognized thought leader in sales leadership, an inductee in the Professional Speaker Hall of Fame, and has been named the #1 sales influencer to follow by LinkedIn.

In Right on the Money, Colleen writes that the past two years could be regarded as “an evolutionary moment for sales”, and that “evolution came by revolution” as a result of the pandemic. That is, the world of sales was forever transformed once salespeople were forced to be creative sans traditional belly-to-belly interactions.

In fact, many sellers realized that they could be much more efficient and profitable working remotely to meet the needs of the new buyer, instead of being on the road all the time. Expense accounts could be scaled back and a lot of time could be saved—all with virtually no impact on employee and client trust.

Another huge shift Colleen has seen is the morphing of the business development specialist (BDS) role. Historically, this role has served as a “cold-calling team” that passes leads to senior sales people after a simple vetting process The new and more effective role for these more junior people is nurturing existing customers, giving customers strong reasons to stay loyal to your company.

In today’s world, Colleen’s clients have found that the inside sales role is better left to an experienced, seasoned professional able to have high-level discussions with prospects.

Colleen points out that the pandemic revealed poor sales practices, in that some companies had been going overboard on customer-centricity. She explains that a “customer is always right” approach can cost a business money, brand reputation, and access to markets.

Likewise, there is a danger to incorporating potentially controversial social issues in one’s branding and marketing efforts. Instead, Colleen advises, your company may wish to focus on the good it can do in its own community.

In Right on the Money, Colleen proposes a formula she calls “the Tempo Triad”, in which she encourages salespeople to engage in conversations across three different media platforms (she recommends LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) in three different ways:

1) sharing their company’s unique content

2) sharing something a customer posted

3) commenting or asking a question about something a customer has posted.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Colleen:

● www.engageselling.com

Get her book, Right on the Money:

● www.amazon.com/Right-Money-Principles-Bold-Growth/dp/163195671X