A common outcome of mergers and acquisitions is that the customers and partners of the acquired company face a lot of uncertainties about product evolution, product support and their own technology roadmap considering this uncertainty. Its also a golden opportunity for competitors of the acquired company to launch an aggressive sales effort of win over the customers of the acquired company. This seems to be the case with Virtual Iron which was recently acquired by Oracle. In the past few weeks, I have talked to a few prospects of ours who are looking for a list of Virtual Iron customers along with the key users of the solution at those accounts. This is a proven strategy that has worked well in the past and will continue to do so in the future as well due to the uncertainty associated with mergers and acquisitions. Companies who recognize this early know that they need to plan a systematic approach to reach out to all the relevant customers of the acquired company within the first two quarters and create a hot opportunity. The key to success lies in high quality and actionable lead data and intelligence which allows them to identify the target accounts and pitch precisely to the decision makers who are exploring alternatives. Do you sell virtualization solutions and services? If yes, have to created a sales & marketing plan targeting Virtual Iron customers?

I just finished an interesting conversation with a CEO at a security software company and he told me something that made me think about the underlying strategy. He said a well known startup in the email space that was acquired by a large public company started off with one part of their sales and marketing effort focused on selling into accounts that were using their competitors product. At the face of it, it might seem strange and unnecessary. But if you think further it can be a very good strategy for some businesses:

• Targeting your competitors’ customer defines the target market for you very easily. You know that the customers have a need, suffer a pain point and are using something. You, obviously, have to show something to differentiate from your competitor, but this strategy solves an important issue of finding target accounts who have a pain point. 
• If you can sell into your competitors’ customers it helps you to validate your product and build confidence in its ability to address well defined requirements of customers who are already using another solution and have their requirements clearly identified. It helps you to whet your product and sales pitch very well. 
• If your customer has a large customer list, then focusing on those customers may be a good for your startup to go out and get some quick wins without having a heavy duty list building, lead generation, lead qualification and appointment setting process. You can go straight to the decision makers and pitch. They already know what you are trying to sell them. 

How to go after your competitors’ customer is a topic for another post that I will cover soon, but dwell on this and see if this is applicable to your startup.