You bought the company for the customer base. The investment thesis was simple: Cross-sell your flagship product into the acquired entity's 500 enterprise accounts, and EBITDA expands by 18% in Year 1. It’s a standard synergy play.
Then you opened the hood. You found two Salesforce instances that look nothing alike. One tracks ‘ARR,’ the other tracks ‘Bookings.’ One requires 12 fields to close an opportunity; the other lets reps close deals with a handshake and a blank field. You don’t have a ‘Single Source of Truth’; you have two sources of fiction.
The cost of this fragmentation isn't just operational annoyance; it is financial hemorrhage. Recent data from Nektar.ai suggests that companies lose 10% of their revenue annually due to CRM data leakage. For a $50M portfolio company, that is a $5M miss on the top line—purely because your systems can’t agree on who the customer is. When you delay integration to ‘avoid disruption,’ you are actively choosing to pay this tax.
Most Operating Partners treat Salesforce consolidation as an IT ticket. It’s not. It is a Revenue Quality issue. If you cannot see the pipeline in real-time, you cannot forecast. If you cannot forecast, you cannot manage the board. And if you wait 12 months to ‘do it right,’ you will miss the window to capture the very synergies that justified the deal.
When faced with two disparate Salesforce orgs, your CTO or external consultants will likely propose one of three paths. Two of them are wrong.
This involves taking the acquired data and dumping it into the parent org. It fails because it ignores process. If the acquired sales team uses a different sales methodology (e.g., Challenger vs. MEDDIC), their data won’t fit your fields. You end up with a ‘Franken-org’ full of empty fields and validation errors. Failure Rate: High.
Consultants love this. They suggest building a brand new, perfect Salesforce instance and migrating both companies into it. It sounds clean. It’s also a disaster for Private Equity timelines. Research indicates a full Greenfield rebuild takes 6 to 18 months. You don’t have 18 months. You have a 5-year hold period, and year 1 is for value creation, not infrastructure building.
This is the only path that aligns with PE velocity. You designate a ‘Master’ org (usually the larger one) and perform a strategic migration of only active data.
According to Bain & Company, 70% of companies fail to effectively integrate sales plays into their CRM. This isn't a software problem; it's a prioritization problem.
Speed is the primary currency of post-merger integration. A mediocre integration executed in 90 days beats a perfect integration executed in 2 years. Here is the playbook for Portfolio Paul.
Don’t let anyone touch the schema. Implement a ‘Code Freeze’ on both instances. No new fields, no new plugins. Run a ‘Field Trip’ analysis to see which fields are actually populated. You will likely find that 60% of custom fields have < 1% utilization. Delete them from the migration plan immediately.
Before you move a single record, build a unified dashboard. Connect both Salesforce instances to a BI tool. This allows the Board and the CRO to see a ‘Global Pipeline’ view without waiting for the technical migration. This buys you political capital and stops the ‘blind flying’ panic.
This is where the work happens. Use a tool like DemandTools or validity to deduplicate accounts before they enter the Master org. If you migrate duplicates, you kill adoption. Sales reps will not trust a system that shows the same customer three times. Ensure you have a plan for customer retention tracking during this chaotic switch.
Turn off the legacy instance. Read-only mode is a crutch; kill it. If you leave the old system accessible, reps will log in ‘just to check something’ and you will end up with shadow data. Force the behavior change.
The Bottom Line: Your goal is not IT perfection. Your goal is Revenue Velocity. Every day your sales teams operate in silos is a day you aren’t cross-selling. Integrate the revenue engine first; fix the plumbing later.
