And as with any other significant investment, they demand, and deserve, careful, active management at a time of major corporate change. They must become involved in the story of the merger, learning to focus on the positive aspects of the change in their relationships with customers, and enjoying suitable rewards for their extra efforts.

Let us take a look at the issues that executives of Szemsted Industries faced when they were confronted with bringing together the skilled, but differently trained, sales forces of their own company with those of Watson-Baker. The first one is characteristic of most mergers among companies that produce and sell science-based products.

The pharmaceutical company that emerged at the end of the process found itself with a sales and marketing dilemma. Until a unified marketing strategy could be drawn up, drugs that had been developed by the separate companies continued to compete against each other after the companies had joined. And the sales reps, highly competitive by nature, were reluctant to abandon their aggressive selling against the former competitors even though they now were colleagues. Slowdowns, upsets, and misdirection caused by the transition could have been financially devastating.

Often, at the outset at least, this type of problem is compounded because separate marketing strategies have driven the sales efforts. When sales reps eventually are asked to take on new lines, they must learn not only about the products themselves but about the unfamiliar marketing and promotional efforts that stand behind them.

This creates major work for management which is obliged to move quickly to unify the sales forces, bring differing marketing, advertising, and promotional efforts together promptly, and deal with variations in sales incentives and salesforce compensation. All this contributes to the significant expense of merging two large firms and offers little payback in terms of increased income.

But the situation also offers a fine opportunity for management to boost the effectiveness of the combined sales force. This was exactly the right time, we feel, to take significant steps to upgrade sales performance in a way that need not add much to top-line, costs but that can contribute significantly to bottom line income almost immediately.