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Of the different acquisitions with which Jason Leet became involved at ExactTarget of Indianapolis, Indiana, there\u2019s little question that the seventh was the most impactful on his finance career.

As it turned out, this would also be his last acquisition\u2014or perhaps we should say his last ExactTarget acquisition, given that this time it was ExactTarget itself that was being acquired.

In 2013, ExactTarget became not only the largest company that tech wunderkind Salesforce had ever acquired but also the first publicly traded one.

Over the next 9 years, Leet would work on more than 40 acquisitions for Salesforce, including an additional four publicly traded firms. What\u2019s more, over this period he would lead the finance team that took charge of what he calls Salesforce\u2019s \u201cbest-in-class M&A machine.\u201d

However, turn back the clock to his ExactTarget days, and it\u2019s easy to see that for a number of months, Salesforce did indeed flip Leet\u2019s world upside down. 

\u201cI was involved in some of the diligence, so I was aware of what was going down several months in advance,\u201d explains Leet, who had joined ExactTarget in 2006, as he vividly recalls for us the company\u2019s impressive climb upward\u2014along with its disappointing 2007 decision to pull its IPO due to Wall Street\u2019s economic collapse.

\u201cNever waste a good crisis: Having that IPO door slammed became a pivotal moment in our future success,\u201d comments Leet, who tells us that ExactTarget then turned to private investors for funding, which allowed the company to generously invest in the business at a time when many firms were curtailing their spending.   

After consecutive years of impressive revenue growth, ExactTarget went public in 2012, after which Salesforce came knocking on the door with a $2.5 billion deal in 2013.   

\u201cSince this was Salesforce\u2019s first acquisition of a publicly traded company, there was a sense of being in it together with the Salesforce folks with regard to how this whole thing was going to work,\u201d remarks Leet, who tells us that when word of the deal first surfaced, he fed his enthusiasm for the career chapter that lay ahead by buying a copy of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff\u2019s book Behind the Cloud.

\u201dTo me,\u201d he continues, \u201cthe acquisition was an opportunity, first, to support the business\u2014but as you go through an integration, it\u2019s also a chance to follow different lanes of experience, with an eye toward growing with your different teams.\u201d

For Leet, this growth would remain inside the realm of M&A, where his 9 years at Salesforce would be what he describes as always being \u201cfresh,\u201d as he became engaged with the different management teams of the companies that Salesforce acquired and sought out knowledge to help in determining how best to invest in the acquired firm to maximize post-acquisition top-line growth.

From the ExactTarget acquisition on forward, Leet tells us, M&A has consistently broadened his view of the role that finance plays in business and exposed to him how often the \u201cpeople part\u201d is the most time-consuming yet most vital aspect of the success of an acquisition.

Leet concludes: \u201cMy team and I had this sense of ownership, in that we took personally the success or failure of the acquired companies\u2014and because of this, we were able to step up and play a broader leadership role.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney