Sforce Maximizer

Org strategy for organizations involved in Merger and Acquisition in Salesforce

If your company recently acquired a new company who uses salesforce or in the process of Merger and Acquisition, one of the challenges is to have a strategy for integrating the new salesforce org with your existing Org. For companies who already have multiple orgs, the challenge is more complex to identify the right approach to deal with the existing org. We always get requests from executives who want to see one view of the pipeline, orders from all orgs and help the sales team to do upsell and cross-sell.  😳  How do you deal with such a problem? My post here would help you with some guidelines to make the right decision.

  1. Identify the final outcome with the new org for Merger

One of the challenges I have seen architects or admins do is to start creating solutions on the Org strategy without understanding the exact outcome the company wants to achieve with the merged org. Once you have a discussion with the executives and the stakeholders for both orgs, the questions to ask them will help you with the right strategy.

  1. Will there be one centralized sales leadership for all the companies to manage pipelines?
  2. What would be the key metric used to determine the success of the Org Strategy to measure success? Is it upsells, cross-sells or new customer acquisition from the Merged company?
  3. Do we need one view for reporting across all orgs in terms of pipeline, marketing, service and orders?

These questions would help you to formulate the right Org Strategy.

Solution Options

Once the outcome for the management is defined, here are some solutions which can work on integrating this external org to your Org.

  1. Hub and Spoke Model – In this pattern, you would create or identify one centralized org as your main org and have all the orgs integrated around this for easy reporting. The key things would be a strategy for syncing accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities across all orgs.
  2. On-demand integration– In this scenario where the external org is an independent business unit, you can create an on-demand integration strategy which would allow your current org to integrate with your external org real-time or batch mode on demand for reporting reasons. This works well for public traded companies which do quarterly reporting and the batch jobs pull in data on a demand basis and prepare for reporting.

 

Solution Discovery Prior Implementation

Once the solution is clear, here are some steps which you can start which would help you to prepare for the implementation.

4. During Implementation

Once the solution has been finalized, here are some tactical items which you can do and plan for during implementation.

5. Things to consider

With my experience of merging multiple orgs, here is the list of potential items which you need to watch out for gotchas.

To summarize, during merger and acquisition, you would want to consider the following things.

  1. Define the final outcome the business wants with the merged organization org.
  2. Do a deep discovery which would allow you to identify a solution which involves security, data, deduping strategy, users and business process integration across companies.
  3. Have a contingency plan to handle exceptions on data and data quality issues.

I have a final strategy deck which I would be happy to share with you guys which would help you with this. Please feel free to post your comments or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for the updated deck.

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