The study
The year after the deal closes.
A cross-border acquisition is priced partly on revenue the two companies are supposed to earn together once they are one. A great deal of that revenue never arrives — and it goes missing where revenue is actually made, in the merged commercial organisation. I am interviewing the people who were in the room. This page is what I am asking, and what taking part involves.
Why this question
The deal is not where it goes wrong.
Half a century of deal-level research has looked for reliable predictors of acquisition performance in the design of the transaction — how it was paid for, how related the businesses were, how much prior experience the acquirer had. Two generations of meta-analysis found the same thing: those variables explain very little. The explanation sits after close, in the integration.
And within the integration, the asymmetry is stark. Cost synergies are largely contractible and observable — a consolidated plant either closed or it did not. Revenue synergies are neither. They depend on customer relationships that individual people own, and on routines that were never written down. When they fail, they fail slowly and out of sight, and the first hard evidence often arrives a year late in a variance report.
That is the part the literature is thinnest on, for a straightforward reason: it does not live in filings. It lives with the people who were there. So that is who I am asking.
The value that justifies the premium is disproportionately promised on the revenue line — and disproportionately destroyed there.
The size of it
Four numbers that frame the problem.
All third-party and attributed. None of them are findings of this study — this study has none yet. The direction they point in is consistent: integration on the market-related side drives overall deal performance more strongly than cost efficiencies do, and high integration intensity — which helps the cost position — damages it (Homburg & Bucerius, 2005).
- $3.4tn Global M&A deal value in 2024. The instrument is not in decline; its success rate simply has not improved in proportion. McKinsey & Company (2025)
- up to 35% The share of a deal’s total synergy target that revenue synergies can carry. Manjee & Humsi (2018)
- 23% The average gap between revenue-synergy goal and attainment, across a survey of 200 M&A executives. Chartier et al. (2018)
- 38–53% The share of European deals that destroy value, depending on which failure criterion is applied. Craninckx & Huyghebaert (2011)
What I am asking
One question, and it is deliberately open.
The study is inductive. It is not testing a model I arrived with; it is built to surface what practitioners actually did, saw and decided, and to find out which of those things bear on whether the revenue case arrived.
That is why the interview is structured around one specific integration rather than around your general views. General views are easy to give and hard to learn from. A concrete incident, walked through in order, is where the interesting material is — and it controls for the way memory smooths a story out after the fact.
What actually happens at the sales and marketing interface of a merged company in the first year after a cross-border close — and through what mechanisms does it bear on whether the projected revenue is realised?
The field is cross-border acquisitions of knowledge-intensive commercial organisations — media, marketing services, and adjacent B2B services — where revenue rests on client relationships that individual people own rather than the company.
Who I would like to talk to
Four perspectives on the same event.
Between fifteen and twenty-five conversations in total. The four groups are not quotas; they are four vantage points on one phenomenon, and disagreement between them is data.
Private-equity partners, corporate development, M&A counsel.
QualifiesA decisive role in the post-merger integration of at least two cross-border deals.
Sales and marketing leadership inside a merged unit — CRO, CMO, VP Sales, country lead.
QualifiesA decisive role in the post-merger integration of at least two cross-border deals.
Integration leads, PMI consultants, HR and people leaders.
QualifiesA decisive role in the post-merger integration of at least two cross-border deals.
Anyone who carried a customer book or ran a commercial function inside the acquired company through the first year after close.
QualifiesOne deal is enough. The qualifying experience is having lived it, not having architected it.
Integrations that under-delivered are actively wanted. A study assembled only from the ones that worked is a study of survivors, and it would tell you nothing you could use.
What taking part involves
One conversation. That is the whole ask.
No preparation, no documents, no follow-up work.
- Format
- A semi-structured interview by video conference, 45 to 75 minutes.
- Language
- English by default, German where you would rather — the protocol exists in both.
- Shape
- Structured around one integration you were inside, walked through in sequence. Not a questionnaire.
- Preparation
- None. Bring the deal you remember most clearly, including — especially — one that did not go to plan.
- Afterwards
- Nothing required of you. If you want it, you get to correct my reading of what you said before it enters the analysis.
- When
- Pilot conversations from Q3 2026; the main wave through 2027.
What is protected, and how
You are talking about live commercial matters. This is built for that.
Senior practitioners discussing recent transactions carry professional risk beyond the usual. Every protection below is a design commitment of the study, not a courtesy.
- Pseudonymised at transcription
- You, your employer, the deals and any person you name are replaced with codes at the point of transcription. No publication or presentation will contain anything that identifies any of them.
- The key is kept apart
- The one file that maps codes to identities is stored separately from all research data and is never shared with anyone, including the second coder.
- EU storage, GDPR terms
- Recordings and transcripts sit on EU-resident, access-controlled storage, used solely for this doctorate and the academic publications that follow it. Retained for the doctoral period plus the publication window, then deleted. No transfer to third-country processors. AI-assisted transcription, where used, runs under the same constraints and is disclosed.
- Withdraw at any point
- Including after the interview, in which case your data are deleted. No reason needed, and no consequence.
- If you are under an NDA
- No recording is made. I reconstruct notes afterwards, and — where you permit — you verify the reconstruction the same day. You review the paraphrase before it enters analysis. Nobody should have to choose between candour and a contractual breach.
What you get
Not nothing, and not a sales call.
- An executive summary of the aggregated findings when the study completes — the practitioner version, not the dissertation.
- An optional thirty-minute debrief with me after the defence, on whichever themes you want to go into.
- The interview itself, which several pilot readers have described as the first time anyone asked them to reconstruct that year in order.
This is doctoral fieldwork, not business development. Nothing is sold to you, at any point, and participation creates no commercial relationship of any kind.
How the evidence is handled
For the ones who want the method.
Stated in advance and fixed in a versioned protocol, so the design cannot quietly follow the findings.
Critical Incident Technique
Every account is anchored to one specific, recent incident rather than to general reflection. It is the standard control for the way recall smooths a narrative after the fact.
Gioia methodology
A disciplined coding approach that keeps every interpretation traceable back to the words that produced it — first-order terms, second-order themes, aggregate dimensions.
A second coder, measured
An independent second coder works a share of the transcripts, and inter-rater agreement is computed against a threshold set beforehand rather than asserted afterwards.
Member-checking
Participants get the chance to correct my reading of their own material. A researcher who coined his own concepts needs people who can tell him he is wrong.
A stop rule fixed in advance
Collection continues until three consecutive interviews produce no new first-order codes, sustained across at least two of the four groups. Written down before the first interview, so it cannot be adjusted to suit the result.
Deviant-case analysis
Under-delivered integrations are deliberately recruited, and part of the analysis is aimed squarely at finding evidence against my own framework. The insider position that opens doors is also the bias the design has to answer for.
Where this sits
The institutional facts.
Executive-mode, practitioner doctorate.
Triple-accredited — EQUIS · AACSB · AMBA.
Associate Professor in Cross Cultural Management, EM Normandie — whose own research is cultural friction in post-merger integration.
Written informed consent, GDPR data handling, and the integrity requirements the charter sets.
Defence scheduled 7 October 2028.
Figures cited
- Chartier, J., Liu, A., Raberger, N., & Silva, R. (2018). Seven rules to crack the code on revenue synergies in M&A. McKinsey & Company.
- Craninckx, K., & Huyghebaert, N. (2011). Can stock markets predict M&A failure? A study of European transactions. European Financial Management, 17(1), 9–45.
- Homburg, C., & Bucerius, M. (2005). A marketing perspective on mergers and acquisitions. Journal of Marketing, 69(1), 95–113.
- Manjee, N., & Humsi, A. (2018). Revenue synergies in M&A. McKinsey & Company.
- McKinsey & Company. (2025). Global M&A report.
If this is you
One conversation, and it stays yours.
Underneath the framework and the figures, the research object is ordinary: how commercial people are treated in the first year after their company is sold — whether their expertise is engaged or merely surveilled, their sense of who they are respected or written over. If you were there, I would like to hear how it went.
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