5 Ways Expert Insights Lead to Successful M&A

The success of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) heavily depends on a deep understanding of the target company, which can’t always be achieved through company reports or mentions in the news. Industry nuances, company culture, leadership styles, competitor interactions—these are facets you can’t necessarily uncover by researching numbers and figures, yet they significantly impact whether or not two companies have the right synergies to succeed.

AlphaSense, a leading AI-based market intelligence platform, provides Expert Insights alongside an extensive universe of private, public, and premium content. Within that universe of content, Expert Insights can be a critical tool for filling the gaps in M&A research and strategy by providing nuanced insight into any public or private company—straight from the mouths of the experts themselves.

Information from industry experts provide high-level firsthand insights that create a 360-degree view of your potential M&A target, equipping you to make better, well informed business decisions. Below we explore five surefire ways that Expert Insights can lead to successful M&A for any firm.

Intangible Factors of M&A Failure

While there are many reasons companies decide to enter M&A deals, it is rare that all parties involved in any given deal will share the exact same motivations. According to Harvard Business Review, 70-90% of M&A deals fail, often due to “integration issues” like building a single culture, commonality of thought, and succeeding at collaboration. Additionally, two of the top reasons for M&A failure are a lack of cultural fit and a misunderstanding of the target company. These intangible factors indicate that even the most exhaustive due diligence processes can still leave gaps in the M&A research process.

Navigating the cultural challenges around M&A integration is a delicate process. Having a deep understanding of both team cultures well ahead of the deal, as well as taking a disciplined approach to successful integration, is vital. This level of comprehension goes beyond numbers and figures to include leadership styles, operating procedures, company culture, and other intangibles that play an impactful role in determining whether an M&A deal will succeed or fail.

Outside of the standard practice of due diligence on a particular company, getting quality insights from industry experts for softer parts of the process is equally important to understanding the pure viability of an M&A deal. Industry experts have firsthand experience as an executive, employee, customer, or competitor of the company being discussed and provide valuable insights not typically available through traditional research methods.

Experts, like those found in the AlphaSense expert transcript library, can provide valuable context around market trends and can also offer insights on what’s likely to happen in the future. While this type of forecasting can be anecdotal, it’s a valuable supplement to data analytics.

We explore the top surefire ways that AlphaSense’s Expert Insights can lead to successful M&A strategies in greater detail below.

Top 5 Ways Expert Insights Lead to Successful M&A

1. Firsthand Expert Perspectives

AlphaSense Expert Insights are one powerful way to reduce the risk of M&A failure with critical firsthand expert perspectives that can fill in any M&A research gaps. Firsthand insights from industry experts who have actually spent time as part of the organization are unparalleled when it comes to questions of culture, leadership styles, internal motivations and challenges, and other intangible factors that affect the success of M&A.

Researchers can easily access various operator perspectives through our powerful research tools in three effective ways:

• Expert transcript library – Dive into over 35,000 expert transcripts in our library to access proprietary insights from former executives, customers, competitors, and channel participants across a range of industries. Leverage our premium insights on thousands of public and private companies to create strategies that lead to successful M&A deals.
• Expert Call Services – Gain access to more than one million pre-qualified expert profiles spanning all industries across the globe. Our Expert Call Services allows you to quickly connect with experts for customized interviews to fill in any research gaps in your M&A strategies.
• All-in-One Market Intelligence – Combine our suite of Expert Insights with an extensive collection of broker research, earning calls, filings, news reports, and more all available in AlphaSense to understand how a market perceives a company in addition to the in-depth intelligence provided by Expert Insights. Our one stop solution for expert insights provides you with a full 360-degree view on any company or market.

Where traditional expert networks may fall short, Expert Insights is an alternative data solution of first-hand, relevant information that is invaluable in making informed business decisions. 

2. Comprehensive Due Diligence

Thorough due diligence on a target company is undeniably the cornerstone of successful M&A. However a singular due diligence report is not enough to make informed decisions in today’s fast-moving markets, no matter how comprehensive it is. The stakes have never been higher for incorporating alternative resources, like Expert Insights, into your due diligence process.

Performing comprehensive due diligence means keeping your finger on the pulse of your entire target company, market landscape, and competitors at all times—and fast. The AlphaSense platform empowers you to execute this caliber of due diligence with confidence for every single M&A deal you tackle.

With cutting-edge AI technology, you can save time, get straight to the most relevant insights, and be better equipped to find and capitalize on alpha-generating opportunities before anyone else. Level up your due diligence process by:

• Discovering Expert Transcripts – Quickly analyze expert transcripts to gain firsthand insights with smart search filters, transcript summaries, and notebook tools. 
• Accessing Extensive Financial Information – Search a company’s ticker and run thematic searches across broker research and expert transcripts to quickly validate assumptions.
• Performing Time Series Data Modeling – Filter by SEC filings to access income statements, balance sheets, and more, and then drill down to see and export QoQ data for trend analysis.
• Extracting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – Filter by earnings calls and see KPIs highlighted in the insights panel. Click “Show History” to expand your view to all snippets related to that KPI over time.

Additionally, M&A researchers can easily conduct company due diligence and initiate coverage by using our Table Explorer feature. This feature allows you to generate a historical lookback of a company’s financial performance (broken out quarterly or annually), quickly spot seasonality, and further understand growth trajectory.

Being able to answer all the questions that come with doing your diligence requires a tool that allows you to answer them quickly. AlphaSense’s AI search engine is purpose-built for business decisions, allowing you to pull out relevant insights and streamline your due diligence process.

Unsure of what the most crucial questions are that you should be asking in your due diligence processes? Download our checklist, 5 Crucial Due Diligence Questions to Consider for PE, VC, and M&A Investors, to learn what you need to know before agreeing to a purchasing contract.

3. World-Class Compliance

Compliance plays a critical role in M&A for a few reasons. First, firms need to uncover any red flags shown by target companies in the form of legal violations (such as antitrust, data privacy, health and safety, and sanctions). Secondly, firms also need to know the rules and regulations a target company must comply with as a result of their location, industry, client base, or any other reason. In this case, expert calls can be a valuable source of insight and guidance.

Not only can experts provide deeper explanations of compliance rules, regulations, and risks, they can also evaluate how they might apply to a specific M&A deal and help firms ensure they are covering all bases when it comes to compliance assessment. Expert calls are a critical resource for firsthand information; however, they may also come with the risk of exposure to confidential or material non-public information (MNPI).

Fortunately, compliance takes top priority at AlphaSense to deliver trustworthy alternative data for safety and peace of mind for business professionals.

Our dedicated compliance team carefully reviews each transcript to ensure it aligns with regulatory requirements, minimizing the risk of exposing primary research to MNPI. Some topics that our compliance reviewers are trained to accurately identify include:

• Contradictions between the consultant’s representations during their onboarding phase and what the consultant represents in the one-on-one consultation
• Discussions of non-public information regarding the consultant’s current employer
• Breaches of confidentiality obligations that the consultant has with other entities
• Revelation of current sources of information at a target company
• The disclosure of information that is both material and non-public

The industry experts interviewed, investment analysts conducting the interview, and transcripts published have all been diligently screened to ensure that all content published in the AlphaSense expert transcript library is compliant.

Learn more about our dedicated compliance process in our blog, Exploring the Compliance Process of Expert Insights.

4. Faster Time to Insight

Time to insight matters when making business decisions in the fast-paced environment of M&A deals, and timely access to relevant insights can make or break an investment opportunity. A fully realized M&A research strategy incorporates the power of Expert Insights and an all-in-one market intelligence platform to maximize return on investment (ROI).

With over 10 years of investment in AI development, our AI allows you to surface insights from tens of millions of data points at the industry, watchlist, and document level to better track market landscape and industry trends, identify disruptive players, and discover competitors’ hidden strategies.

Our powerful AI eliminates the manual task of searching for crucial information by quickly parsing through an extensive content universe of expert transcripts, broker research, financial documents, and more to pinpoint quality insights in seconds.

Accelerate your time to insight with our innovative platform features:

• Fast Navigation – Utilize AI-driven features like Smart Synonyms™ and sentiment analysis in the platform to quickly surface nuanced expert insights. These tools allow you to quickly find relevant documents based on your sentiment, making it easy to navigate across the four perspectives found in our vast content library.
• Instant Insights – Leverage our generative AI to glean instant insights from any expert or earnings transcript with Smart Summaries. Smart Summaries is the only generative AI (genAI) tool that draws from a premium content universe specifically curated for business professionals.
• User-Friendly Interface – Stay informed in real-time with automated alerts and use custom search filters to surface documents relevant to your research. For expert transcripts, AlphaSense’s user-friendly platform offers timestamped audio, making your research process even more efficient.
• Smart Search – Browse by expert title, company name, industry, topic and other smart search features, like our AI assistant, to discover nuanced insights that will fill in research gaps in your M&A strategy for a comprehensive understanding of your target company.
• Enterprise Intelligence – Use AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence which enables secure searches, summaries, and follow-up questions across your proprietary internal data and a vast repository of 300M+ premium external documents—all powered by our industry-leading AI for market intelligence.
• Sentiment Analysis – Identify and quantify levels of emotion around specific research topics within expert transcripts. Using a boolean operator, you can search for mentions of a specific topic in a positive, negative, or neutral light (for example, “acquisition” AND “positive”) and filter by Expert Insights.

AlphaSense leverages award-winning AI and NLP technology to accelerate your primary research by saving you time and effort to develop fast, well-informed M&A strategies.

Optimize your research budget by exploring the ROI of Expert Insights in our whitepaper, The Expert Insights Flywheel: Maximize Return on Your Time.

5. Complete Competitive Intelligence 

Complete competitive intelligence has evolved beyond just social media listening, website monitoring, or collecting public information. Often, those sources are unreliable and difficult to cohesively track down. In today’s landscape, companies that consistently outperform the market gain an edge over their competitors by:

• Having a one-stop-shop for market intelligence
• Uncovering blind spots with comprehensive due diligence
• Adopting advanced technologies to speed up workflows
• Leveraging granular insights from industry experts

Unlike internal operators of a target company, industry experts can provide a neutral and valid assessment of the competitive landscape that contributes to your overall risk assessment. Firms can turn to industry experts for critical guidance on a given industry and company, including the complexities and nuances that must be understood to successfully operate within it.

While quantifiable research and data analysis are pillars of any M&A strategy, the real value of complete competitive intelligence lies in being able to extract granular insights that will drive competitive advantage. What’s really happening with competitors of your target company?

Expert Call Services can be a valuable source of information on company competitors that you can’t find elsewhere. Not only have experts dealt with these competitors firsthand during their time with a company, they’ve often worked with them directly in other roles. This level of deeper insight can be especially valuable for M&A deals that involve highly technical or regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, energy, healthcare, and financial services.

Strategize Successful M&A with Expert Insights

A successful M&A strategy relies on a 360-degree view of a target company, market, and  industry that can only be captured by leveraging the nuanced and granular insights provided by industry experts. Having a market intelligence platform that leverages the power of AI search technology allows researchers to surpass the limits of traditional expert networks.

Today, AlphaSense powers deep market analysis capabilities for leading organizations around the world, including 85% of the S&P 500, 75% of the world’s leading asset management firms, and 80% of the top consultancies.

Gain competitive intelligence to accelerate your M&A strategies with Expert Insights. Start your free trial today.