Acquisition - The Sales Dilemma!
- Sales Process Consolidation Cheatsheet
Author: Prashant Nambisan
Sales Cloud implementations are the bread & butter of Salesforce’s offerings. The Lead-Contact-Account-Opportunity model has been there since the early days, and they form the bedrock of a very large number of implementations around the world.
However, even with successful sales cloud rollouts, there could be many further changes/enhancements added. Sometimes, we can even have major changes made down the line. One such scenario which often jolts the existing implementation and forces both business users and administrators to re-look at what has been rolled out is – ‘Acquisitions’.
When a company using Sales Cloud acquires another company there are many questions raised to determine how to align the two sales processes and the potential impact on the current Salesforce implementation. There are decisions to be made regarding how the two sales teams will work together, whether to use the same Sales Cloud instance, and what all factors to consider before moving forward.
Primarily there are three broad approaches to follow from a sales process consolidation perspective:
Which road to choose?
Separate Processes
Collaborative Processes
In this approach both the sales processes continue to operate, albeit with some hand-offs / data sharing / overlapping sales processes. This is generally employed as a 2 to 3 year timeframe interim solution till the companies work towards a common sales process. From a technical implementation perspective this is tricky as you need to have overlapping/dependent business processes, data flow mapped back and forth, and security architecture all defined very clearly.
Single Process
This is a case where there the two companies’ sales processes are mapped to one single process. This typically happens when either the acquired company is much smaller or when its sales process is not well defined. This could require a fair bit of work from business side from training and collaboration perspective.
Now, the question arises how do we decide which approach to follow?
In my experience, there are primarily 5 parameters to consider, based on which we can help narrow down on the appropriate approach to follow.
The 5 parameters are:
Products:
Here we look at how the products/services sold by the companies fare against each other. The parent and acquired company may be selling the same or related products which means aligning their processes could be much simpler. If the products are complementary, there are opportunities for cross sell which give an indication towards a collaborative process. Of course, the products could also be unrelated, or even potentially competitive, where you may keep the processes separate.
Process:
For this, we map out how much the two sales processes are aligned. This is not just the sales stages but really the sales guides and cheatsheets used by the reps – how sales happen on the ground. There could be a close mapping between the two processes, or they could be completely different, or anywhere in between. The closer the processes, the easier it is to get the other pieces in alignment and push for a single process.
People:
The next part of the sales process is who all are involved in the process. Sometimes closely aligned acquisitions even get the same sales teams working on each other’s deals. The people parameter includes not just the sales reps, sales managers, ISRs, and Account Managers, but also the channel involved – including partners and distributors. If the channel and sales team are similar, there is always a chance for a single or collaborative process.
Platform:
This parameter covers the technology part of the acquisition. We are looking at the scenario where the parent company is using Sales Cloud. The acquired company may be using a different CRM, Salesforce, or maybe no CRM at all (many companies still track Sales on excel sheets!). Also, there is the consideration if the CRM is integrated tightly with other systems in the organization.
Presentation:
Finally, the last parameter to consider is about how data should be presented – reporting and analytics. This plays a key role when determining how close you want to bring the two sales processes. Where there is a strong need to have a common reporting mechanism, you may have to at the least figure out how to get the data mapped to the same metrics.
With these 5 parameters in hand, we can map out which process is best suited. Below image is a quick reference cheatsheet for mapping out the Approach based on the Parameters.
In the above cheatsheet, identify where the acquisition stands for each parameter, and see which approach is the most aligned. In most cases, the approach which has the maximum parameter variables matched will be the best fit.
This above reference will help serve as a guide for your decision-making process but is by no means comprehensive. There could be many additional factors which influence the decisions. Additionally, there is generally a short-term and long-term approach. So, for example, if three parameters indicate Separate processes while two indicate Collaborative process, you may choose to start with Separate processes but then try to move the three parameters also to the collaborative side and in the long-term have a collaborative process.
In this manner, this reference sheet will serve as a useful guide in your Sales Consolidation process as part of acquisitions.