You just closed the deal. High fives all around. But now, the clock is ticking on integration, and the most critical part ! sales acceleration ! is stalling out of the gates.

If you’re a sales leader, corp dev pro, or part of M&A integration, you’ve seen this movie: you acquire a fantastic product, and even spend many months integrating it, but your existing sales team just won’t sell it. They have two main reasons for being shy to sell: they don’t care and they don’t want to take a risk with their customers.

It’s a dense subject, but the core problems are surprisingly simple:

1. The Quota Problem: They Just Don’t Care (Yet)

Your reps are not trying to sabotage your deal thesis. They are commission-paid professionals often working on a 50/50 pay structure where half their salary hinges on closed business.

At the start of the year, they took on a massive quota on existing products. They’ve spent months building an account plan. Then, the acquisition drops, usually mid-year, requiring them to readjust their time, effort, and priority to hit that original quota. Why pivot to a new product when the pressure is already intense to focus on their established plan?

The fix? You guessed it: money talks. The deal team is in a unique position to plan the right spiff, quota relief, or commission structure for acquired products. This isn’t an afterthought; it needs to be built into the deal model because it’s a foreseeable issue every time you close an acquisition.

2. The Reputational Risk: Don’t Make Them a Guinea Pig

Your sales team spends a huge amount of time building personal relationships and getting deep into a buyer’s business. This trust is their currency.

Introducing a newly acquired product that is not yet fully integrated, not easy to understand, or not yet aligned with the main company’s value proposition creates a huge reputational risk for your sellers. Asking them to stand in front of a customer to deliver on something where they haven’t been properly trained on value prop or objection handling is asking them to put their commission and their reputation on the line.

The fix? Define the ask using the sales stages they already know. Don’t drop a full product line on them. Do you want them to:

• Qualify leads?
• Do a warm handoff to the acquired company’s original sales team?
• Just run the first-call deck?

This fix requires discipline during diligence and integration planning. And critically, the enablement has to be in the language of your company, not the acquired company. Aligning product, marketing, and sales enablement as early as possible is a major challenge, but it’s the only way to translate the acquired capabilities into value propositions your reps already understand.

For both of these problems, don’t make assumptions that someone else is responsible for the blind spots. Put a sales expert - like Acquire2Win - in the room with the deal team during due diligence and before integration planning.

That is how you accelerate.

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