What happens once your organization announces a merger or acquisition?
If you’ve been through an M&A integration, you’ve likely experienced the excitement and nervousness that comes along with it. From preparing for Day 1, to Day 100, you're rethinking and reshaping the future of your organization.
If you’re responsible for the integration of sales and marketing; people, processes, and technology, you’re likely already thinking about how to manage the change and the new ways of working.
But how are you thinking about integrating essential systems, like your CRM or marketing automation tools?
When integrating these systems, you may be asking yourself:
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How do I merge data and processes from two CRMs and Marketing Automation tools into one?
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How do I flag and integrate shared leads, prospects, and accounts?
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How do we identify potential cross-over in sales territories?
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How do we know if a current or prospective client has purchased overlapping products and/or services?
The Chief Commercial Officer at the leading governance, risk and compliance (GRC) advisor in financial services, reached out to us to support them with the merging of their sales and marketing systems and data, post-M&A integration.
A private equity firm acquired their organization and another financial service company and has the goal of doubling revenue by 2025.
We were hired to integrate their Salesforce CRM and Marketing instances and data, with a focus on:
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Consolidating CRM data; a single dataset for product and customers
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Building a data framework; reliable, maintainable data ecosystem aligned with their IT strategy
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Launching one CRM & one Marketing Automation tool; one system for optimized work aligned with their Commercial Transformation goals
The Pioneer Approach
At Pioneer, we value diversity in our people, skillsets and experiences. For each project, we create a team of expert strategic execution, change management and data analytics consultants with diverse experiences who are hungry, humble and connected and have the same goal of being an exceptional partner and delivering world-class results.
Our team, combined with our CRM Data and Processes Integration Process keep your business objectives with your people at the center of our work throughout the project.
Discovery
The project is kicked off with a stakeholder alignment discussion, where strategic business goals are reviewed, expectations established, and the communication plan is determined.
With the various stakeholders, we review the current state of system usage for how it enables business process supported by data.
Next, we inventory the systems architecture and complete a data inventory and quality analysis. Getting access and an overview of the various tools and reviewing the data quality and assessing the current processes state will lay the framework for future phases.
After the assessment, a high-level project roadmap is created and aligned with key post-integration milestones. Detailed work plans are created for each phase, including dependencies, milestones, and key deliverables, ensuring your project is being managed for quality and timeliness throughout our engagement.
In some cases, we are validating prior work from other consulting firms who supported the client with M&A strategy.
Future State Design
Next, we dive into the design of the future state. We design the data model, data architecture and infrastructure, and future state system design to enable future ways of working for the new, combined team.
Together, we define the approach to master data management (MDM), decide on rules to maintain data accuracy, determine how to execute, and perform validation user acceptance testing.
A process gap analysis is created to determine how to best achieve your future business goals. We’ll identify any gaps or shortcomings that you might have so that a strategy can be created to overcome any issues and improve upon business operations.
Lastly, we finalize the high-level roadmap created in Discovery and move on to Execution.
Build & Execute
It’s time to bring the vision to reality, and where the bulk of the work occurs. Data is migrated, user interface enhancements are made and downstream data integration is completed.
During this phase, you must still report on sales metrics and drive growth during the post-M&A integration. A Sales Analytics Reporting Dashboard is created and customized for different views and stakeholders, so you still have a pulse on your sales and marketing organization during this stage, and after the project.
An agile approach to development is taken, which includes unit and integration testing within each sprint deployment. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is employed throughout the development phase in combination with sprint demos to make sure the solution satisfies the user requirements and functions well.
Change Management & Training
A key component of any M&A project is a change management strategy and deployment. We keep the employee experience at the center and create processes around the employee experiences. Our Change Pulse tool allows us to provide insights into change projects and make game-time decisions.
Rollout & Go Live
The single CRM and Marketing Automation instances are now live! During the rollout, bugs are monitored, and processes are adjusted as needed. There is a pilot group followed by deployment waves, customized to the needs of the project and client. This allows us to test and learn as we go as well as deploy appropriate change management and training approaches for each roll-out group.
Enhancements
Now that we’ve live and the team is trained, we adjust for any updates to the operational processes or dashboards. This could range from additional dashboard views or adjusting the process for how leads are distributed, whatever it may be, we adjust for it.
Choosing Pioneer Management Consulting for your post-M&A Integration
At Pioneer, we bring 10+ years of experience serving mid-market to large enterprises in various industries, with a ton of heart and hustle.
Every decision we make is filtered through the lens of our values; humble, hungry and connected. This means we strive to elevate you, our client, and build relationships with you and your teams. We never hesitate to go the extra mile.
Lastly, our team of world-class consultants is measured by your happiness – allowing us to focus on what matters the most. With a recent customer satisfaction score of 95% and employee engagement of 99%, we’re confident we have the right talent, processes, and technology to support you in your post-M&A integration.
Whether you need help integrating technology and processes or aligning cultures to drive the new company forward, we’re here to support you with your M&A integration needs.
