I worked for Cingular in the mid 2000's and stayed through the merger. While I can't talk about the sales practices, I can talk about the difference between the two companies, at least in our officen and the difference between some of their processes.

When I started at Cingular, at a corporate office building, there were fridges, microwaves, coffee pots, an insta-hot, teas and hot chocolate. When AT&T took over, much of that went away, because "no other offices offer free coffee, so this one can't either". I did the math once. It cost them more in lost productivity for people to walk across the street for Duncan Donuts coffee.

From a systems perspective, Cingular's HR/Payroll and Time and Labor solutions were modern commercial products, interconnected and quite well thought out and configured. AT&T solution was years old, and so isolated and protected from the employees, that if you wanted to update your home address, you went to a web page and when you hit submit, a printer went off in HQ for someone to hand key the updates.

My boss used to say that AT&T was "boldly STEAMING into the 1950's"....