As a marketing leader, if your company acquired four other companies in three years, you would likely have some lessons to share about that experience. Welcome to "3"…three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker. Isabelle Papoulias has lived that experience through the pandemic. She's the CMO at Mediafly - that's a revenue enablement and revenue intelligence company. Isabelle, after four transitions in three years, what's one of the key learnings?
Isabelle Papoulias: A key learning is that acquisitions can be very disruptive, not only for the company that's being acquired, but for the company that is making the acquisition and taking in the new company, and I think that's not talked about quite as much. So, if you are starting to make a lot of acquisitions, make sure you have the people and process in place to be able to ingest those acquisitions.
Drew: With all this chaos and disruption going on, where should a marketing leader start?
Isabelle: Start with the people first, and that means showing a lot of empathy. Tactically, that means doubling down on the one-on-ones with people, right, both the people on the original team and the new folks that are coming in to your team. Check-in with them; how are they doing? How are they feeling about things? Things can be chaotic. Is everything okay? And how can you help?
Drew: Isabelle, you've told me about a lesson you experienced first-hand that's really quite counter-intuitive to the way most leaders respond.
Isabelle: Yeah. So in our first acquisition, one of our board advisors said to me, "Don't rush. Don't rush through the process," after the announcement. And in some ways, I did exactly the opposite, which is, we shut down the brand and the website in three months. We felt really proud of ourselves, because we integrated the two companies very quickly, and, in hindsight, it was not the right decision. We hurt ourselves in some respects; the incoming company had a stronger brand equity that we had anticipated. We lost some awareness, and it feels counter-intuitive, right, but you really need to think through all the ramifications of those things and really take the time to do it right, and resist the pressure, potential pressure from leadership, to want to move fast. That can be very hard.
Drew: I think there's an internal pressure, too, as well, to make progress quickly. These are great insights, Isabelle. "3" is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com, and just one of the resources we provide to accelerate marketing leaders. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.