5 reasons why Corporate Development teams fail

Updated May 2026 — originally published January 2017 | Over the years I've spoken with hundreds of M&A professionals working across a wide variety of companies — from one-person deal teams at sub-$15M revenue businesses all the way up to Fortune 10 firms with hundreds of people involved across dozens of simultaneous deals.

The challenges corporate development teams face have evolved, but many of the root causes remain stubbornly familiar. Here's what's still holding teams back in 2026:

1. Spreadsheets and fragmented tools still dominate—despite better options

Since Excel was first released in the 1980s, it has been the default tool for corporate development teams to manage their pipeline of targets. While Excel is a powerful tool in many ways, it is not the best way to keep track of your M&A pipeline.

While many teams have graduated to purpose-built M&A platforms, a surprising number still rely on patchwork solutions: a CRM not designed for deal flow, a project management tool stretched beyond its purpose, and a shared drive full of out-of-date spreadsheets stitching it all together.

The cost of this fragmentation has only grown. In 2026, deal velocity matters more than ever. Teams managing pipelines across disconnected tools waste time chasing status updates, reconciling conflicting data, and manually re-entering information—time that should be spent on analysis and relationship-building.

Then, of course, there are the zombie deals. You know the type: passed on six months ago, but somehow still haunting the active pipeline because no one has a centralized, auditable record of what happened and why. Without a stage-gated, purpose-built system, pipeline hygiene is a constant battle.

2. Target engagement is still unnecessarily clunky

The due diligence request-and-response process remains one of the most friction-heavy parts of any deal, and it's worse now that expectations have risen. Sellers in 2026 are more sophisticated; they've been through processes before, they compare experiences across bidders, and a disorganized buyer raises red flags fast.

The old model—a static request list emailed in a Word doc, documents uploaded to a basic data room, and a trail of one-off follow-up emails—still persists at many organizations. The result is the same as it always was: documents get lost, requests get duplicated, and sellers start to wonder whether this buyer can actually execute.

Modern virtual data rooms and AI-assisted document review have raised the bar significantly. Teams that haven't adopted structured, collaborative diligence workflows with clear request tracking, version control, and responsive communication are leaving both efficiency and deal goodwill on the table.

3. Functional teams have full-time jobs outside M&A

Most companies that focus on inorganic growth as a key strategy have a lean, core M&A team. Many of the people who are involved in diligence or post-merger integration, however, are not focused on M&A full-time. These are the functional teams (i.e., IT, legal, finance, HR, etc.); they have full-time jobs, plus M&A responsibilities.

Collaborating on transactions with these teams is crucial for the success of the deal, and is also one of the biggest challenges corporate development professionals run up against. Assigning tasks, aggregating diligence findings, getting progress updates, and managing documents requires a great deal of time and patience, especially because it is usually done only with Excel, emails, and regular team meetings (those using M&A software may find things to be a bit simpler, of course).

For teams still operating with the analogue approach, though, information is out-of-date as soon as it’s in your fingertips, and knocking on doors and making phone calls becomes your new full-time job.

4. Diligence findings are still getting siloed

As you collaborate with functional areas and get updates while moving through the due diligence checklist, these need to be rolled up to a central area so findings can be incorporated into the purchase agreement: both for synergy opportunities, and for negotiation levers.

One of the quickest ways to wind up with a failed acquisition—and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for all the wrong reasons—is by neglecting to adequately record, track, and address the issues and risks that are found during the due diligence process. Because these issues and risks often live in someone’s inbox or personal laptop, it’s easy for information to slip through the cracks. This can result in failure to get the best price on the deal, plus missed (or entirely wrong) synergy targets.

In an era where AI tools can help synthesize and summarize large volumes of diligence material, there's less excuse than ever for letting findings fall through the cracks. But AI tools only work on data that's been properly captured. The underlying discipline of structured recording, clear ownership, and central aggregation still has to come first.

5. Insider info falls into the wrong hands

Sensitive deal information stored in shared drives, personal email accounts, or general-purpose collaboration tools like Excel is a serious and growing security risk. Many corporate development professionals I speak with reach out to Midaxo to proactively reduce the risk inherent to M&A, or because they’ve already made costly mistakes when it comes to security.

This is the other unfortunate way to wind up in the front page of the news: allowing sensitive info to fall into the wrong hands. Purpose-built deal management software makes this easy to avoid. With the traditional tools, it’s a challenge to stay organized and have visibility into who can see what, ensuring that there is a balance of collaboration and control.

The tools available to corporate development teams in 2026 are significantly better than they were in 2017. The gap between teams that use them well and teams that don't has never been wider.