Instead of backing away when a customer is undergoing an M&A, lean into it. Frame your product or service as a tool to boost performance and profit, making them a more valuable entity during the transition. While competitors retreat from the perceived disruption, you can become an essential partner, leaving the path wide open.
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Stop trying to convince executives to adopt your priorities. Instead, identify their existing strategic initiatives—often with internal code names—and frame your solution as an accelerator for what they're already sold on doing. This dramatically reduces friction and speeds up deals.
When an acquisition supplants an internal project, the messaging is crucial for morale. Position the internal team's work as a successful R&D phase that validated the market need and informed the "buy" decision. This celebrates their contribution and frames the acquisition as an acceleration of their validated strategy.
Don't wait for prospects to reveal they're evaluating others. Assume they are and ask directly, "What companies are you looking at right now?" This normalizes the behavior, demonstrates your confidence, and allows you to frame the subsequent comparison on your terms rather than reacting defensively.
Don't view high-pressure sales requests as roadmap disruptions. Instead, see them as opportunities to pull forward planned features, co-design them with a committed customer, and provide the team with a motivating, tangible deadline. This turns external pressure into an accelerator for validated product development.
Don't just solve the problem a customer tells you about. Research their public strategic objectives for the year and identify where they are failing. Frame your solution as the critical tool to close that specific, high-level performance gap, creating urgency and executive buy-in.
Simply "servicing" an account by fulfilling orders makes you a replaceable commodity. To become indispensable, you must proactively bring insights and create new growth opportunities for your client. This shifts your role from a reactive vendor to a strategic partner, making you "sticky" and invaluable to their business.
True urgency comes from implicating pain, not just identifying it. By asking the customer "who suffers and what suffers if you do nothing?", you tie the problem to their personal job measures and company revenue, giving you leverage to re-engage them.
When a potential acquirer calls, the founder's default mode should be information gathering, not pitching. By asking strategic questions ("Who else are you talking to?", "What are your goals?"), founders can extract valuable competitive intelligence about the market and the larger company’s plans, regardless of whether a deal happens.
Urgency isn't about deadlines or discounts. It's the critical point where a customer realizes that the risk of maintaining the status quo is greater than the risk of adopting your solution. A strong ROI case that highlights the cost of inaction is the key to creating this realization and closing the deal.
Creating a new product category is slow. The fastest path to revenue is building a superior solution that replaces an existing, budgeted expense. By positioning against the cost of an in-house team or a legacy service, the purchase becomes a simple replacement decision, not a new investment.
