$350B worth of 2025 technology acquisitions will fail – highlighting a practical guide to harmonizing your post-M&A Pricing & Packaging to ensure your inorganic growth story succeeds.
According to Bain’s ‘Looking Back at M&A in 2025: Behind the Great Rebound’, strategic M&A saw a massive resurgence last year – up 38% from 2024. Technology drove much of that rebound, with deal volume increasing 76% YoY to $478B. History is a harsh teacher, though: we know 70-75% of these acquisitions will fall short of their intended outcomes, often due to poor integration planning and strategic misalignment.
Standard integration roadmaps are designed to mitigate this risk across pillars like Product, Go-To-Market, People, and Systems. However, most make a critical omission: Pricing & Packaging. Without harmonizing how you charge, package, position, and price, the "1+1=3" vision will never actualize.
To realize the value envisioned at the LOI, leaders should take these five steps.
Pricing is easy to deprioritize – always important, rarely urgent. Pricing is the buyer’s window into your business, it signals value to the market and to your team, and it’s how you make money, but – certainly in times of change – it falls to the backburner. Mitigate deprioritization risk by putting pricing on your Integration Roadmap.
Tactically, this means attaching KPIs, timeline and key milestones, and outright ownership to pricing as an integration pillar. Strategically, this means defining decisions to be made and transformation to undergo. One decision central to all post-M&A pricing harmonization is packaging: how will my new and legacy product be packaged together?
Strategic packaging decisions are especially critical now: 94% of $1B+ technology deals in 2025 were "scope deals” focused on adding new capabilities or markets – up from an average of 69% over the previous decade. If your deal adds scope, your packaging must evolve to reflect that new breadth and realize target acquisition outcomes.
Everyone has an opinion on pricing. Form a dedicated committee across both legacy and acquired teams to channel that commentary.
This group should meet weekly or bi-weekly during the high-intensity early phase, reverting to a monthly tempo as the integration matures. Key mandates include driving strategic iteration, maintaining pricing version control, and tracking progress against roadmapped KPIs and milestones.
Three notes on your committee roster:
Work within the committee to define clear guardrails for what ‘good’ pricing looks like, establish singular decision-making authority, and create feedback loops to iterate quickly but thoughtfully as integration unfolds.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Merging two legacy pricing schemas without tidying up a bit first will yield messy pricing debt that causes internal and external confusion, making integrated deals tougher to sell and slower to expand.
Run a post- (or ideally pre-) M&A diagnostic to assess pricing health. Understand what’s working, what’s broken, and how customers actually perceive value today. This will serve as a shared pricing fact base for your committee and will help you fix problems and reduce leakage before scaling sales efforts.
Essential metrics for your diagnostic:
Why did you do the deal in the first place? Assuming proper diligence, early pricing decisions should anchor directly to the acquisition thesis. Without this anchor, you and your team will limp through "guess-and-check" cycles, signaling uncertainty to the market and compromising momentum.
Strategically, this means building pricing that delivers on the product differentiation envisioned for your buyers and outcomes intended for your business. If you acquired a company to achieve product parity but then charge for it as an expensive add-on, you’ve missed the mark. If the new functionality grants you access to new buying centers but your sales reps are using it to "feature bomb" past personas with empty value, time to revisit deal rationale.
Tactically, this means grounding decisions in the upside case of the original investment model.
No model's perfect but rallying your team around discrete changes and aggressive targets will beget clarity and quicker execution.
Note: the criticality of a strong willingness to pay fact base pre-acquisition shows through in our recent research – organizations with revenue growth above expectations are 30% more likely to have a good understanding of customers’ willingness to pay at different service levels than their below expectation counterparts. Further, of 12 annual planning aspects considered, this aspect showed highest alignment of all – with 88% of above expectation CEOs reporting good sense of market willingness to pay.
Early momentum beats a perfect plan. Easy to say, tougher to do, but logging some quick wins early in the integration cycle will prevent doubt from seeding and a reversion to old habits or status quo across your team.
Consider three asymmetric bets to build early traction:
Quick wins turn acquisition theory into practice. And when you ultimately exit the M&A honeymoon phase, you’ll do so happy and hopeful, as your longer-term plan picks up where momentum leaves off for sustained, integrated performance.