I’ve been through two exits. One was planned, one was less so. Both were exciting. Both were brutal in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. And in both cases, the marketing team — my team — absorbed the bulk of the uncertainty while somehow being expected to keep the engine running.
Nobody hands you a playbook for this. Which is why I’m writing one.
This isn’t a theoretical take. It’s what I’ve learned the hard way, across boardrooms, late-night Slack messages, and more than a few conversations I probably should have had earlier. If you’re a CMO heading into an acquisition — as the acquiree or the acquirer — here’s what I wish someone had told me.
First: Accept That Your Team Will Know Before You’re Ready to Tell Them
Here’s the thing about marketing people: they’re professionally trained to read signals. They notice when the CFO starts sitting in on calls they weren’t invited to before. They notice the sudden uptick in NDAs. They see the calendar blocks labeled “Board Prep.”
By the time you get the green light to communicate, half the team has already been running their own internal scenarios for weeks. They’re not panicking — they’re strategising. Which is both a credit to them and a problem for you, because the stories they’ve written in their heads are almost never accurate, and almost always worse than reality.
The lesson? Communicate earlier than legal says is comfortable. Not recklessly — but the vacuum that forms between “something is happening” and “we can officially say something” is where anxiety breeds and your best people start updating their CVs.
I grew up in a household where my parents told us just enough to keep us from catastrophising but not so much that we were carrying weight we couldn’t handle. That balance is exactly what a CMO needs to strike in an acquisition. It’s parenting, really. Albeit with slightly better comp.
Before the Deal Closes: Own the Narrative Before Someone Else Does
Before any announcement goes out, you have a window — and it’s shorter than you think — to shape what this story means. Not spin. Framing. There’s a difference.
The questions your customers, prospects, and market will immediately ask are:
- Will the product change?
- Will my account team change?
- Is this company still who I thought they were?
- Should I be worried?
If your marketing team isn’t already preparing answers to these questions before the press release drops, you’re behind.
Brief your top accounts personally if you can. Write customer comms that are direct and human, not lawyered-up boilerplate. The instinct is to be vague to avoid commitment. The reality is that vagueness creates more fear than a clear “here’s what’s changing and here’s what isn’t.”
And whatever you do, do not let the acquirer’s PR team write your customer communication without your fingerprints on it. You know your customers. They don’t. Yet.
During the Transition: Protect Your Team’s Identity
This is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Acquisitions are, at their core, a collision of cultures. Two companies with different ways of working, different rituals, different definitions of what “good” looks like suddenly sharing a Slack workspace. It’s like a second marriage where both sides have kids and everyone is trying very hard to be on their best behaviour at the dinner table.
Your marketing team will be asked to adopt new tools, new processes, new brand standards, and quite possibly a new name. Some of it will be an improvement. Some of it will be a step backwards and you’ll need to say so. But through all of it, the thing that retains your best people is a sense that who they are and what they do well still matters.
What that looks like in practice:
Don’t let your team become “the acquired marketing team.” They’re the marketing team. Full stop. Get them integrated into planning cycles, strategy conversations, and cross-functional work as fast as humanly possible. Visibility kills the outsider feeling.
Preserve rituals where you can. The weekly team stand-up, the Friday wins post, the way you run a campaign brief — these small things are the connective tissue of culture. When everything else is changing, familiar rhythms matter more than they sound like they should.
Give people permission to grieve. This one surprised me the first time around. Even when an acquisition is objectively good news — better backing, bigger market, more runway — there’s a grief process for what the company was. The startup energy, the scrappiness, the sense that you were building something from scratch. Some of your best people will feel that loss even as they’re excited about the upside. Let them. Acknowledge it. Don’t rush them to the “this is great” conclusion.
After the Close: The Work Nobody Puts in the 100-Day Plan
Most integration plans are obsessively focused on systems, processes, and organisational structure. Fair enough — those things matter. But the softer stuff has a longer tail and more impact on outcomes than most boards appreciate.
Brand equity is fragile. If you’re the acquired brand and you’re being folded into a larger identity, push hard for a thoughtful transition timeline. Customers bought from you for a reason. Yanking the brand overnight signals that reason no longer matters. Fight for a migration plan that respects what you built, even if the end state is full integration.
Watch your metrics carefully — and be honest about what’s noise vs. signal. Churn goes up in acquisition periods. Pipeline velocity slows. Win rates dip. Some of that is genuine business impact; some of it is just distraction tax — your sales team is half-focused on the integration and half-focused on deals. Know the difference and communicate it up clearly, because if you don’t explain it, someone else will, and their explanation probably won’t be as accurate.
The first joint campaign is important. Not because of the revenue it generates — it probably won’t move the needle on its own — but because it sets the tone for how the two teams work together. Make it a win. Pick something scoped enough to execute well, and make sure both sides feel ownership. A good early collaboration creates momentum. A bad one creates camps.
What I’d Tell My Younger Self
I came up in product marketing, which means I’ve always been wired to think about the customer’s perspective first. That instinct has served me well in acquisitions — keeping the external narrative grounded in what customers actually care about, rather than what the internal stakeholders are wrestling with.
But I underestimated, particularly early in my career, how much the internal narrative matters. The story your team tells themselves about who they are and where they’re going has a direct, if hard-to-measure, impact on execution quality. People who feel uncertain produce uncertain work. People who feel like they’re building something, even mid-integration chaos, produce better work.
Your job as CMO through an acquisition isn’t just to manage the external brand. It’s to be the steward of your team’s sense of purpose when everything around them is in flux. That’s leadership. It’s also, frankly, the hardest part of the job.
I’ve done it twice. I’d do it again. But I’d start the internal communication earlier, fight harder for the customer narrative, and spend more time in the first 30 days just listening to the team before telling them how we were going to navigate it together.
As my mum would say: less talking, more listening. She wasn’t wrong.
