Recently, my company Paradyne was acquired by Generation-e.

Both of us have strong

businesses, are Microsoft partners, have many customers, and funnily enough both
use Exclaimer Cloud Signatures for Office 365 (but in different ways – more on that
later).

As with such a big change, we had a number of ways to get the word out – press
release, social media, blog posts etc.

The most important thing was to get the word out to our customers as quickly as
possible so that they would not have any concerns about a loss of service,
interruption to projects, and overall continuity of their relationship with our
business and people.

Naturally, we sent out a communication to all of our customer contacts. However,

this often isn’t enough as any marketer will tell you. The reason is simple: your
contact database is only as good as the data in it. And the reality is that unless
your business has the email address of every single user in it, chances are the
data in your database is stale.

What do I mean by this? Have a look at the average project you may have with a
customer. Generally, the contacts for the customer in your database will be the
relationship owner, project manager, and maybe some of the project resources that
were involved in the initial meeting(s) – if you’re that thorough.

So, it’s not uncommon for the people that your staff actually deal with to not
exist in your CRM system, and as such have no idea that M&A has taken place and
that things are going to change.

You can’t rely on the primary contact(s) forwarding around the official
communication that you send to them, or for your own staff to bring this up in
general communications.

During a M&A there are many things that change – this is where Exclaimer Cloud
Signatures for Office 365 comes in to reach people that corporate communications
simply can’t.

As part of our acquisition, we changed over IT systems fairly quick as both

Paradyne and Generation-e used mainly the same suite of technologies. To ensure
that our customers weren’t concerned when our email addresses suddenly changed, we
used Signatures for Office 365 to notify them of this impending change by simple
modifying the banner at the bottom of our signatures