The Art of Remote M&A: Using Long-Form Writing to Compensate for the Shortcomings of 'Zoom-Style Deals'

Editor's Note: This article is a contributed piece by Mona Sabet, Chief Strategy Officer at UserTesting. The views expressed herein are solely those of the author.

Zoom, Slack, and other virtual collaboration tools have become our go-to platforms for closing deals. However, they are not ideal. Nothing compares to the experience of being in the same room as counterparts, finally hammering out a difficult agreement, and resolving differences over a celebratory dinner afterward.

But there is a way to improve virtual collaboration: returning to long-form writing, using Google Docs or other collaborative tools to allow team members to understand issues more comprehensively, digest information at their own pace, and share their responses.

Our company's recentacquisitionof a Norwegian technology company, spanning the period before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, serves as a case study in how to move away from "bullet-point thinking" to improve the quality of virtual deals.

A reasonable alternative

On one hand, the forced shift to video conferencing meant that everyone—even law firms typically resistant to modern technology—could see each other, rather than just talking over audio calls. If you believe deals built on genuine human relationships are more likely to succeed, then deals made over Zoom are indeed better than those made over the phone.

On the other hand, the old practice of locking everyone in a conference room until a final agreement was reached simply cannot be replicated in video meetings. Every good negotiator understands that real compromise often begins when people grow tired of being in the same room, eating bad sandwiches, hearing the same arguments repeated, and hastily handling messages during breaks.

Zoom is ultimately different. I cannot keep team members engaged in a Zoom meeting for more than 90 minutes. As a result, deals drag on, and compromises become harder to reach. The lack of full-day, face-to-face meetings hinders the interpersonal bonds needed to drive deals forward and ensure smooth post-acquisition integration.

Complex deals require deep thinking. But unlike financial analysis or product development, they require both deep thinking and a high degree of cross-functional collaboration.

Slack, email, and Zoom cannot replace the in-depth discussions required for deals. The "always-on, always-available" nature of these tools, while convenient, also fosters "kicking the can down the road" behavior. Instead of taking time to craft detailed responses, people throw out a half-baked idea to buy time and think about it later.

Returning to long-form writing

In the Norwegian deal, our internal team struggled to stay aligned in a fully remote environment. Every M&A playbook is different, and when unexpected issues arise, I am used to walking over to a colleague's desk to solve them together in real time. But that was impossible remotely, and we experienced some communication missteps, especially when preparing to integrate the two companies.

To avoid misunderstandings among internal teams, we changed our communication approach, shifting to long-form writing in collaborative tools like Google Docs, providing more detailed context, constraints, and viable paths forward.

Ironically, in the new remote work environment, I found that the best tool for aligning our team's M&A strategy was long-form writing—an age-old skill that the business world had long abandoned in favor of bullet points on slides.

To be fair, technology has been changing the human dynamics of deals for years. For a long time, M&A was executed like this: after an acquisition proposal, team members set aside personal lives and spent days in a "war room" reviewing due diligence materials, structuring the deal, and negotiating with counterparts. Additionally, time was spent assessing the deal's impact on fees, taxes, intellectual property, and other areas each internal team was responsible for.

These complex assessments were written in long-form—sentences and paragraphs that deal teams had to take time to read and synthesize. The physical "war room" allowed us to work both independently and collaboratively: sometimes digesting analysis alone, and other times diving into the implications of complex issues together.

By the mid-2000s, in Silicon Valley deals I was involved in, conference calls gradually replaced face-to-face interactions. Meanwhile, instant messaging became a broader corporate phenomenon. We sat at our desks, negotiating over speakerphones and sending brief messages via IM. Reduced travel made deals feel faster, but there was less preparation before each call.

In 2016, I worked on a deal between two California companies where the teams never met in person except for a post-closing dinner. That set a new benchmark.

Meanwhile, email, chat apps, and now video conferencing have led us to believe we can move faster no matter where we are. The pandemic made me realize that for large, complex corporate deals, these communication technologies may make us feel like we are doing more, but they do not truly help us do better.

The essence of a deal—past, present, and future—is driving change by leveraging human relationships, and I still firmly believe that face-to-face is the best way. It is a change management effort that affects all teams and spans two companies. Like all change management, it requires tightly coordinated communication to execute successfully.

Perhaps the dance of deal-making had already changed before the COVID-19 pandemic. But the crisis pushed our team to rely on a different set of technologies. Video conferencing is indeed an improvement over the phone calls we once relied on. And document collaboration, while still not as ideal as our old-fashioned "war room," is certainly a better choice for aligning deal teams than our self-indulgent addiction to PowerPoint bullets and instant messaging.

Like everyone else, M&A practitioners must adapt to new ways of working during and after the pandemic. M&A team members must quickly master the art of fully remote deal-making.