Untangling the Tech Stack: A Post-Acquisition Integration
How RevOps unified two companies' systems without losing data or sanity
Company
B2B SaaS
Size
400 employees (combined), $60M ARR
Stage
Post-Acquisition
Timeline
Full integration completed in 6 months
The Challenge
After acquiring a competitor, the company had two of everything: two CRMs, two MAPs, two billing systems. Revenue teams couldn't see the full picture.
Symptoms
- Sales reps working from two different CRMs
- Customers appearing as prospects in the acquired company's system
- No unified view of customer across product lines
- Finance manually reconciling revenue from two billing systems
- Support couldn't see full customer history
Root Causes
- Acquisition integration was deprioritized for 'later'
- No pre-acquisition due diligence on systems compatibility
- Both companies had different data models and definitions
- No dedicated integration team or budget
- Fear of breaking things kept systems siloed
Impact
Cross-sell was impossible. Customer experience suffered. Reps spent hours reconciling data. The acquisition wasn't delivering expected synergies.
The Diagnosis
Mapped both tech stacks, identified data overlap, and designed a phased migration plan that prioritized customer-facing impact.
Key Findings
- 1.30% of acquired company's customers were also customers of parent
- 2.Duplicate contact records numbered over 50,000
- 3.Field mappings between systems had 60% overlap, 40% unique
- 4.Acquired company had superior lead scoring model
- 5.Parent company had better billing and revenue recognition
Maturity Score Changes
The Solution
Strategy: Migrate to best-of-breed from both systems, with a single CRM as the foundation. Move fast but don't break customer experience.
Phase 1: Foundation & Mapping
45 days- Chose parent CRM as target (larger, more customized)
- Mapped all fields from acquired system to target
- Identified and tagged duplicate records
- Created unified object model with combined fields
- Built staging environment for migration testing
Phase 2: Data Migration
60 days- Migrated accounts first, with duplicate resolution
- Migrated contacts with parent record linking
- Migrated opportunities with stage mapping
- Migrated historical activities for context
- Validated data quality post-migration
Phase 3: Process Unification
45 days- Unified sales stages across both teams
- Adopted acquired company's lead scoring (superior)
- Consolidated to single marketing automation platform
- Built unified reporting across combined data
- Trained all reps on single system
Phase 4: Advanced Integration
30 days- Integrated billing systems with CRM
- Built customer 360 view across all products
- Implemented cross-sell triggers and alerts
- Created combined forecasting model
- Decommissioned legacy systems
The Results
Systems Maintained
50% reduction
Duplicate Records
Clean data
Cross-Sell Pipeline
New opportunity
Time to Quote
92% faster
Qualitative Outcomes
- Reps finally had single view of customer
- Finance had unified revenue reporting
- Support could see complete customer history
- Acquisition synergies began materializing
Key Lessons
- 1Plan for integration before the acquisition closes
- 2Best-of-breed means picking winners from both sides
- 3Data migration is 80% mapping, 20% moving
- 4Decommission legacy systems fast - they rot quickly
- 5Unified data unlocks cross-sell immediately