Make no mistake: mergers are challenging. Even so, they can provide organizations with transformative possibilities. One of the biggest—the integration of sales forces—is central to ensuring revenue growth and driving the value that mergers promise but often fail to realize.

Yet integrating sales forces ranks among the hardest parts of a merger to execute—a fact not lost on senior executives (exhibit). Mergers generate anxiety inside and outside the companies involved, and competitors happily exploit such fears to woo star salespeople and poach customers. Nonetheless, savvy companies embrace the opportunity to build a new sales organization that is more than the sum of its parts.

We have identified four steps essential to facilitating the successful integration of sales operations. At the top of the list: understanding the importance of sharing information about the integration process with customers and the sales force. Many companies take the opposite approach and are surprised when postmerger revenue fails to meet expectations. In addition, the combined sales team must quickly win prominent accounts to build momentum and generate internal confidence in the merger. The executives running the integration effort must also recognize that, as important as sales reps are, essential support people must be identified and retained. Finally, senior managers should review the merged portfolio of customers and make tough calls about those that are worth new investments and those that might be shed or given less attention.