M&A Series: Integration Challenges and Opportunities
Summary
Integration during acquisitions requires careful evaluation of overlapping Salesforce functionalities such as account hierarchies, opportunity data, and product catalog setups. Key challenges include data deduplication, mapping financial fields consistently, and deciding how much historical data to migrate. Proper planning for new workflows, approval processes, and data governance is essential to maintain clean and accurate CRM data after merging systems. Teams can leverage this understanding to streamline Salesforce data migration and integration during M&A events effectively.
Takeaways
- Evaluate and align account hierarchies and sales processes before integration.
- Map or create opportunity financial fields to handle differing definitions.
- Plan product catalog integration considering price rules and quote exports.
- Deduplicate data carefully to avoid inaccurate or duplicate records.
- Define data governance practices to maintain data quality post-integration.
This article will start to discuss topics that might arise during acquisition, but considering them beforehand can still give you a leg up. Lets start with overlapping functionalities between Salesforce systems. Things that would be important to look out for would be: Account hierarchy and structure 11 do the two systems manage accounts similarly? If not, how would you consider bringing over that data? How will the processes related to creating and managing accounts be merged? Opportunities and the sales process as a whole 11 The Opportunity object is one of the critical objects in the Salesforce ecosystem as it represents the deal sold. Typically, it also represents the bookings amount.