M&A Series: Examples of challenges
Summary
Mergers and acquisitions involving Salesforce and CPQ can introduce serious challenges if these technologies are not thoroughly evaluated during due diligence. Common issues include degraded customer experience from differing business processes, complex scenarios where Salesforce serves as a product UI built by external consultants, and the complications of integrated billing systems that do not align post-merger. Addressing these challenges early helps avoid costly, lengthy integrations and support issues. Salesforce teams should focus on assessing org maturity, custom UI dependencies, and billing integrations to streamline post-acquisition transitions.
Takeaways
- Evaluate Salesforce and CPQ thoroughly during M&A due diligence to avoid surprises.
- Align business processes before migrating customer data to ensure consistent experiences.
- Assess risks of Salesforce being used as a product UI, especially if undocumented.
- Review integrated billing setups to determine compatibility with existing ERP systems.
- Prepare for potentially long and complex projects when disentangling billing integrations.
I thought it would be helpful to lay out some of the examples I have seen during my Salesforce career as to why I wanted to make the callout to ensure Salesforce and CPQ are evaluated as part of the due diligence process and not left to be something of an afterthought. To avoid using company names, ACME will represent the acquiring company, and Universal Containers will be the company getting acquired. All of these represent different company combos. Example 1: Bad customer experience Universal Containers had done all the work to clean up their Salesforce org and the product they were tying into as their ERP. They had spent a couple of years doing a tech debt project and a complete revamp of the business processes and had them fully rolled out. ACME, on the other hand, was in the opposite state. Depending on who you asked, they had different processes in place. The decision had been to move everything UC had done into ACME but use ACME’s processes.