Here is a number worth sitting with: 70 to 90 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail to meet expectations. That is not a rounding error. That is the norm.
The Harvard Business Review has been saying this for years. Deal teams keep doing the same things. And yet somehow, one of the most important functions in the business, marketing, is almost always missing from the pre-deal conversation.
CMOs typically do not get called in until the press release needs a quote or the integration deck needs a summary. By then, half the decisions that determine post-deal success have already been made without them.
That is a problem worth fixing.
Every major pre-deal failure traces back to gaps in market, brand, customer, or go-to-market thinking. Those happen to be exactly the things a great CMO knows cold.
Bringing in your CMO earlier, during candidate sourcing, vetting, and due diligence, is not about expanding marketing’s influence. It is about de-risking the deal.
Here is what that looks like in practice.
Market and Brand Positioning
Before you close, you need to understand what the combined entity will stand for in the market. CMOs can assess the competitive landscape, identify brand integration risks, and define the combined value proposition before you have committed. Not after.
Growth Strategy Alignment
Acquisitions are supposed to accelerate growth. But the impact on adjacent markets, new buying groups, martech / salestech debt, and new offerings is routinely underestimated. CMOs can model this during due diligence, not in a post-close strategy review six months later.
Go-to-Market Model Differences
If you are combining a direct sales organization with a channel-led model, that is not a sales problem. It is a GTM problem. CMOs who understand both buyer journeys and go-to-market motions can surface those conflicts before you sign.
Customer Validation
Missing revenue targets by even a few percentage points requires a disproportionate cost reduction to compensate. Comprehensive customer validation, ideally led by the CMO and CSO together, surfaces the real probability of revenue continuity and informs the integration plan before you are locked in.
Portfolio and Innovation Fit
What does the combined product portfolio actually look like to a buyer? CMOs with portfolio marketing experience can assess complementarity, coverage gaps, and how to architect a combined offer that makes sense in the market.
Marketing Infrastructure Readiness
Before you close, assess what you are actually acquiring in terms of marketing capabilities, technology, team, and processes. Many acquirers are surprised post-close with martech / salestech debt and other issues. A CMO doing a pre-deal marketing due diligence review eliminates that surprise.
Cultural Fit
This one is underrated. CMOs who understand go-to-market culture, how a company approaches growth, how aggressive they are in the market, can add real signal to culture assessments that HR and finance teams often miss.
The Bottom Line
If 70 to 90 percent of deals underperform, and most of the root causes trace back to commercial and market assumptions that were never validated, then keeping the CMO out of the pre-deal process is not conservative. It’s a significant risk factor to avoid.
The PE firms seeing the strongest post-acquisition commercial performance are treating their CMOs as strategic advisors to the deal team, not clean-up crew brought in after the signing.
If you want to talk about how to structure CMO involvement in your M&A deal due diligence process, I would be glad to discuss it anytime.
