Corporations See Promise in M&A, and Need Outside Resources to Help Them

Good news if you're in M&A: Companies across the board see mergers as a key to their growth over the next two to five years. But they don't plan to staff up to pursue deals. Instead, they're going to look for more outside help while they leverage internal resources.

Specifically, just more than half see M&A as adding 5 percent or more to their revenue growth during that timeframe. That stacks up pretty nicely compared to the average 4 percent annual revenue growth shown by the Standard & Poors 500 over the last ten years.

All this comes from a survey by Deloitte and The Deal. It has more good news, too: Seventy percent of the executives questioned see corporate development becoming more important to their achieving strategic goals. So, no surprise that corporate development specialists are gaining visibility and access to higher ups.

For the record, the survey considers "corporate development" to be "a broad range of activities that support and enable M&A-related growth."

Most respondents (66 percent) have no plans to expand the size of their teams, even though many (60 percent) expect to be busier pursuing deals between now and 2015. The skill they see as being most important: the ability to analyze value and risk. But that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be racing to hire analysts: They see the greatest opportunity for improving their corporate development effectiveness in organization and process as well as talent.

You can get a copy of the survey here.