Managing Salesforce Organizations After A Merger & Acquisition

As part of your corporate strategy, you’re constantly looking to improve the portfolio of products and services that you have; you’re looking to expand into new markets, you’re looking to add new revenue streams. Each of these could be a driver for the acquisitions that you end up making. With each acquisition, you inherit a new CRM system and a new CRM team. 

These new CRM systems and teams could be in the form of new call centres that you have inherited or new digital marketing efforts that now need to be aligned and made consistent with your parent organization; or say common customers that you were both selling into that you now need to rationalize. Chances are that you have found yourself another Salesforce org that you have now inherited (an org in Salesforce speak is the specific instance or version of a customer’s Salesforce system). 

In this article, we’ll cover how you tackle this situation. You can also choose to understand the process by watching the video below.

Let’s go over some considerations and some options that you now have available as you decide on the fate of the two orgs that you have. What are some considerations that go into your decision? 

• First, there’s the broad theme of compliance and legal drivers. Depending on the industry that you operate in there could be restrictions on the amount of collaboration or the sharing of data that is allowed for the two operations and that restricts your options available for a path forward. 
• Chances are there is now a need for consolidation of reporting. 
• The next big theme is the need to streamline data and processes. The acquired company may have been selling to the common customers that you also sell to, and going forward you need to have a unified view of the customer across both of these operations. The acquired company may have its own processes for managing leads managing sales deals and how to report on pipelines, and this is the point in time purely from a standpoint of efficiencies to rationalize and decide on a single path going forward. 
• There’s likely some duplicate functionality between the two orgs and some redundant efforts. This is a good point in time to rationalize and decide again, on a path going forward. 
• Similarly, this is also a point in time when you can assess some best practices that are coming in from the acquired org and make it part of the parent org as well and make it company-wide. 
• The final set of considerations has to do with the governance of the Salesforce orgs. 
  • Do you have users that you need to track now as licensed users across multiple orgs? 
  • Do you have app exchange apps and custom apps that you may have built that you now need to track across multiple orgs? 
  • Do you have a central authority when it comes to keeping an eye on your technology investments when it comes to streamlining your interactions with vendors and partners when it comes to the development resources and the maintenance resources that you’re allocating to salesforce projects in your company? If you don’t have a centre of excellence in place, this is also a good time to trigger that conversation and think hard about it. 

With all that said, you will arrive at one of two strategies going forward – either continue to maintain multiple orgs or have one consolidated single org. 

Go for the first strategy if you have either chosen to continue operations as silos and run the two operations separately or if you have rationalized the products and services and you have now differentiated your orgs based on the industries or geographies that you sell into or your own product lines. 

On the other hand, you may have one consolidated single org because you have chosen to use one of the two orgs – either the parent or the acquired companies or as the master and you have folded the other org into it. Or you have chosen to architect a brand new org altogether and you have picked best practices from each of the two orgs and you have folded them into the brand new org. That’s when you go for the second option.

Ramana Metlapalli