Gaining employee buy-in for the merger, or any transformation for that matter, is critical to success. It is not poor analysis and bad strategy that causes most corporate restructuring to fall apart. When change fails, the reason almost always involves people issues. Examples are employee resistance, a poor internal communications effort, a dysfunctional corporate culture, and lack of line management understanding of what needs to be done (which usually looks a lot like lack of support).

The turmoil of a merger provides a suitable, even a very good, environment for analytical programs that will upgrade sales reps’ performance.

Let’s look at a program that the management of Szemsted Industries could have put in place early in the merger process to help upgrade sales rep performance across the board. The first step is to identify those among the group who might be considered to be the best performers.

This is the elite collection of top producers, or the “Cream of the Corp.” as I (Louise) call them in my recent book of that name. These are the reps at Szemsted and Watson-Baker who always meet and usually exceed their goals. These are the winners who really get it, who seem destined to achieve because they are constantly finding new ways to win and beat the odds.

These clearly defined leaders, who we’ll call the “Stars,” will constitute about 10 percent of the sales force. Beyond them fall the remainder of the reps who constitute the large “Middle Group,” perhaps 80 percent of all the reps. At the bottom of this list will be the lowest 10 percent in terms of performance. We’ll call them the “Others.”

Managers frequently tell us they would like to clone their Stars because they are so few in number and so important to the success of the sales effort. But instead of cloning their Stars, the executives at the merged companies should try to clone what their Stars are doing. We cannot clone people yet, but we surely can clone what they do.

If the techniques the Stars employ could be taught to members of the Middle Group in an effort to help them improve their performance, even a small improvement in performance by each of these would have a dramatic and positive effect on total sales. Here are the ways in which managers at Szemsted could have followed this process and enjoyed better sales performance instead of suffering from disruption during and following the merger.