When different departments push their own projects onto the sales team, reps get overloaded. To solve this, enablement leaders must shift the focus of every initiative away from departmental priorities and toward a shared customer outcome. This unified goal minimizes internal friction and clarifies what's truly important.

A counterintuitive benefit of being acquired by a larger company is improved internal team cohesion. The sudden influx of new partnerships and opportunities from the acquiring entity can compel the smaller team to work more closely together, fostering stronger alignment and mutual support.

In an acquisition, the initial priority isn't strategy, but calming uncertainty. Leaders should establish a constant, accessible communication flow—using tools like chat communities and an open-door policy—to reassure the team and ecosystem, addressing stress before tackling operational changes.

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.

Post-M&A, salespeople are often overwhelmed by new products. Instead of trying to learn every feature, conduct a "listening tour" with customers. Understand their unique definitions of value, as what's important to one is irrelevant to another, even if they look similar on paper.

Deals fail post-close when teams confuse systems integration (IT, HR processes) with value creation (hitting business case targets). The integration plan must be explicitly driven by the value creation thesis—like hiring 10 reps to drive cross-sell—not a generic checklist.

The debate between being product-led vs. sales-led is a false dichotomy that creates friction. Instead, frame all functions as fundamentally 'customer-driven.' This reframing encourages product teams to view sales requests not as distractions, but as valuable, direct insights into customer needs.

During a merger, prioritize people over process. Technical integration is secondary to building trust between teams. Use simple, cultural activities like joint happy hours and "show-and-tells" about the tech stack to humanize the engineering effort and foster empathetic collaboration early on.

A detailed, rigid integration plan is fragile. A better approach is to create an "integration thesis" that sets clear "goalposts" and timelines for making key decisions. This allows for flexibility and data-informed choices (e.g., using A/B tests post-close) rather than locking into pre-deal assumptions.