A Step-by-Step Guide to Preparing for an Acquisition Integration

If you're preparing for an acquisition integration, you're probably asking a straightforward question: What do we need to do before we start merging systems, data, processes, and Salesforce orgs?

Too many companies jump straight into migration planning, only to discover they don't fully understand the businesses they're trying to combine. That's why the first step in a successful acquisition integration is a Business Solution Design (BSD).

A BSD isn't about technology – it’s about creating clarity so you know what comes out of the other end of the next 6-12 months. Below is what we’ll typically cover in a BSD, so that you step into the “doing” part of an acquisition integration project with your eyes wide open and teams prepared.

Step 1: Understand Why the Acquisition Happened

Before discussing Salesforce, integrations, or data migration, ask:

• What was the primary goal of this acquisition?
• Are we trying to increase revenue?
• Increase market share?
• Combine books of business?
• Reduce costs?
• Improve customer retention?
• Expand into a new market?

Every integration decision should support those objectives. If leadership (and by extension, your team) can't clearly explain the "why" behind an acquisition, it's nearly impossible to make good decisions about the "how."

Step 2: Inventory Your People, Processes, Systems, Data, and Reporting

One of the most common mistakes we see is assuming everyone understands how both companies operate. In reality, though, many acquiring organizations know surprisingly little about:

• Who uses Salesforce (or any other CRM) and how in each acquired business?
• Which systems are business-critical for each team? What does each team’s tech stack look like?
• How customer data flows across systems and between teams?
• Where do manual workarounds exist? (Oh, don’t we love those shared Google Sheets doing the heavy lifting in opportunity tracking, quoting, or license provisioning?)
• Which reports do leadership and board actually rely on? Are they in Salesforce, your BI tool, or Excel?

Before your BSD begins, create a current-state inventory of:

• Users
• Applications
• Integrations
• Business processes
• Reporting requirements

The more complete your picture, the more accurate your future-state plan will be.

Step 3: Bring the Right People Into the Conversation

An acquisition integration should never be designed solely by executives or RevOps leaders. Your subject matter experts are the people closest to the work. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how often we speak with a client and they forget a team in their discovery process.

Include representatives from:

• Marketing
• Business Development
• Sales
• Customer Success
• Support
• Product and R&D teams
• Finance / Legal
• IT and Business Systems
• Revenue Operations (and Operations more broadly)

These teams understand the exceptions, dependencies, and day-to-day realities that rarely show up in an org chart. A BSD works best when it reflects how the business actually operates—not how leadership assumes it operates.

Also, don’t assume that your acquiring company’s RevOps team will somehow magically figure it out. Both acquiring and acquired teams need to lean in and provide business context of why things are done the way they’re done. It also doesn’t matter how big either of your RevOps teams are: you’re probably going to need some amount of outside help, because most RevOps teams don’t exist to integrate new acquisitions – they exist to keep business humming along smoothly for current operations.

Step 4: Document Your Most Important Processes

A merger creates a rare opportunity to improve how the business runs.

Instead of asking, "How do we migrate this process?" ask:

• Why do we do it this way?
• How long have we been doing it this way? Does this process still make sense?
• Which company's approach works better?
• Is there a simpler future-state model?

Focus first on the processes that directly impact revenue and customer experience, such as:

• Demand management
• Opportunity management
• Quote-to-cash
• Customer onboarding
• Renewals

The goal isn't to preserve two existing systems operating in parallel, but to create one better system. And as uncomfortable as it might seem, this may mean changing the way the acquiring company operates (we’ve seen many cases of the acquired company having more Salesforce systems and process maturity than the acquiring company.)

Better yet, an acquisition is prime time to create a new foundation and baseline that enables the next phase of growth, be that acquiring additional businesses, being acquired, or going IPO, eventually. Use this opportunity as your launchpad for what will come next instead of dragging along legacy baggage.

Step 5: Know When to Stop Gathering Requirements

Here's the reality: you will never know everything before an integration begins. The goal of a BSD isn't perfect information; it's enough information to make confident decisions and reduce risk when you start executing.

An experienced acquisition integration team knows which questions matter most, where common pitfalls occur, and how to turn complexity into an actionable roadmap.

Companies that achieve the smoothest org merges aren't necessarily the ones that move fastest. They're the ones that take the time to understand their objectives, involve the right stakeholders, and document a clear plan before implementation begins.

That's how we make acquisition integration faster, less expensive, and far more successful.

You’re Not Going it Alone

Does any of this upfront work feel overwhelming? Being a smart operations leader means knowing when to bring in the big guns for help. Each of our growth advisors have managed a dozen or more acquisition integration projects, often for SaaS companies acquiring 4 or 5 new companies a year. If you’re doing this for the first time, or maybe you’ve been through an acquisition a couple of times, it’s often hard to see the forest for the trees. It might feel tempting to “chip away” at easy tasks, like trying to move users in first, or bringing your sales team into the acquiring org, except each of those comes with underlying dependencies: do we have the same customer definitions, how do we track customers in different locations, do we measure revenue the same way, how will our products and pricebooks come together?

Don’t go it alone – reach out and chat with one of OpFocus’ experienced experts before you get started, and we will walk side by side with you with our proven business solution design methodology to keep everyone sane, focused, effective, so that your teams can get back to growing revenue and increasing operating leverage for your investors in no time.