Speaker 0: Alright. Hi, everyone, and welcome to my session, mergers and acquisitions on Salesforce, a framework for success. So just to introduce myself and kinda talk a little bit about why we’re here. Let’s start with who am I. So my name is Sam Roberts. I am seven times Salesforce certified, and I’m currently a program manager for Equifax, uh, who primarily works in Salesforce, but also support some of our other marketing, uh, initiatives including, uh, upcoming marketing cloud as well as marketing cloud account engagement. And one of the joys that I’ve had while working there has been helping to support 10 plus acquisition migrations for CRM purposes into Salesforce. And it was that experience that led me to this presentation today where I’m going to be walking you through this framework that we’ve created to help us create the best possible experience. As part of that, I fully support open conversations and transparency. I think making sure everyone feels included and heard and validated is such a vital part of that work experience. So personally, uh, I love baking and reading with my family. And in everything I do, my goal is to stop things from becoming things.

So let’s go over the agenda a little bit. I tried to keep it with all the w questions. Why are we here? What does it mean to you? What are you going to do about it? And what next? And my hope is that this session is full of practical information that will be fun and informative at the same time.

So let’s start with the first question. Why are we here? We’re here because m and a deals are a daily occurrence. You open any newspaper, your news app, cnn.com, foxnews.com, wherever you get your news. There’s always something about company a buying company b spinning off a portion of their company. It happens to everybody, and I’m sure that if you’re listening to this recording, it’s likely you’ve known about someone who’s gone through this or even gone through it yourself. And if you think about that, why do companies do m and a deals? There’s two reasons. They do it for the deal value because they want the people and they want the clients, And they can get that deal value by making sure that they’re taking care of their people and they’re taking care of their clients. So from the business systems perspective or the process perspective, a key part of that is a the lead to cash migration. Right? If you think about how business runs, it’s you want to get leads in the door, and then you wanna make sure that you can get cash from them at the end once you’ve been able to provide services to them. And a portion of this is CRM. And by making sure that you have that cohesive migration for those back end system processes, you can make sure that employees can collaborate and feel supported once the deal closes, but more importantly, that clients can get the support they need and sign up for new services that were, uh., craftily marketed to them post acquisition while paying for existing ones with minimal disruption. And me saying that probably sounds like a lot, but I want you to keep calm because we’re all in this together.

So what does this actually mean to you? Let’s say that you’re sitting there and someone has said, hey. We bought a company. I need you to migrate them for CRM purposes, and I can actually feel for you because I was there. My manager says, hey. We bought somebody. I need you to figure out how to handle the CRM migration component of it. And when I was thinking about it, what I wanted to frame it as is a full implementation. So many times when you think about an acquisition, it’s like, oh, we just need to, you know, get them in there or, hey. They’re gonna be doing things our way anyways. No. Take that completely out of your head because you’re just going to ask for trouble if you handle it this way. You need to view it as a full implementation with transparency, empathy, and kindness. And I’m going to I appreciate the comment. My moderator during this recording just mentioned to me that sir heard the or, I’ve never actually heard it out loud, so I’m not sure how you pronounce that, was actually just acquired earlier this year. So So I’m glad that I can provide some timely feedback to somebody, and thank you for making me feel validated during this presentation today.

So from the migration perspective, there’s five things. First, business requirements because you have to understand the users. How do they use the tool? A lot of times, you find that the way that use they use the tool is different from yours, and you’re going to need to accommodate from that. User perspective. How are your users going to do their day to day work? You have to enable them to do their day to day job so that they can continue to support their customers and their business processes. System changes. This is the the all the things that can drive any, uh, Salesforce admin or developer nuts. What configuration and development work is needed? Do you need new fields? Do you need custom objects, Apex code, service channels, pick list changes? It’s it’s a lot. And then once the system’s ready, you have to do the data because it’s all about the data. Going back to what we were talking about earlier, employees need access to the data so that they can do their job, and clients want to know that you know them and have their data and will make sure that they’re built properly, that they still have access to their services, all very important things. And finally, training. Right? People need to be trained on how to use your tool and how they can access the tool and what it means for their day to day work. So just have that in your head. Just dispel any notions that m and a is a small project. No. It is a full implementation.

So when I was going through these acquisitions, not at first, but it it took me a few. I kinda came up with these north stars. Right? What’s that north star that we can all look to to make this successful? And this was the first slide that I would show any acquired company that I was meeting with during our very first meeting. And I would say, this is my commitment to you today. We will, one, coordinate the lead to cash migration for you. This is not going to be a death by a thousand cuts or anything like that. It’s gonna be coordinated across the the process. Number two, there’ll be transparency. People like to know what’s happening to them. You probably like to know what changes are occurring. Why is it occurring? They want that transparency into what’s going to be changing. Three, accountability. At Equifax, one of our values is say do, and I love it. If I’m telling you we’re going to do something, we’re going to follow through with it so that everything is communicated, planned, and prepared for properly. Number four, a warm welcome. Honestly, this is probably my favorite because it just gives you that warm fuzzy feelings. Because that company that you acquired is now part of your they’re your coworkers now. Hopefully, they’re gonna be your friends. You wanna make sure that they feel supported and welcomed during this time of change. And number five, provide ongoing support. Right? I know I talked about this being a full implementation, but once that implementation is done, it’s not a one and done. It’s saying now that they’re part of your company, now that they’ve been warmly welcomed, you need to make sure that everyone has what the sport that they need to be successful long term.

So what are you going to do about it? You know it’s important. You know, you’re gonna do it with transparency and accountability and, you know, warm welcomes. You’re gonna make it a team effort. If you don’t know finance or billing or service or those other areas of your company, get to know them. They’re going to be your best friends in this effort. Because when you think about lead to cash, it’s a chain. And, uh, you break any component in that chain, the whole chain falls apart. So don’t let that fun little chain breaking animation happen to you. So you’re gonna make friends. And as part of that, you’re going to create a culture of inclusion and accountability. Respect the work other teams will need to take on. So my wife works in accounts payable, and she also does some HR work remotely. And one of the things that has fascinated me about it is that you always you don’t always know everything that goes into something. Right? You hear pay some bills. You just send them a check. Right? It sounds easy. But in seeing the way that she does her work with care and diligence, you realize that it’s more than that. Is the invoice correct? Did they actually receive the materials? Do you have any outstanding credits that you need to take? There’s a lot that goes into it, and it’s not just a simple, just can’t you just write the bills? Same thing with HR. HR requires kindness and caring, and it’s not just, hey. Aren’t you just, you know, I don’t even know writing some policies. It’s it’s way more than that. So as you work with other teams in this lead to cash chain, make sure that you respect the work that they need to take on because what may sound easy to you may be a lot of work for them. And if you understand and appreciate that, it will make everything go a lot smoother because then they’ll hopefully give you that same respect.

I mentioned it a couple chains because this couple chains clearly, that’s on my brain. A couple times, lead to cash is a chain. Break one piece and everything falls apart. Because if you think about it, they flow into your marketing funnel. They go through the sales process, they go through the contracting process, they go through the onboarding process, and then they get built. Let’s say that you break a piece of that chain and there’s no communication between sales and operations to onboard the customer, all of a sudden, you have a backlog of customers who paid for a service that they aren’t getting access to, and that clean flow of data isn’t working. So new clients can’t get boarded. Or let’s say service. Service doesn’t have access to the information that they need to support the customer. Incorrect bills get sent out because sales was entering data over here, and it needed to get miss getting entered properly into the billing system or something like that. It’s very, very frustrating experience for everyone involved. So having that group family working together, seeing it as a train is what’s really going to make this successful. Now I wrote at the bottom to allow for at least six months to complete this work. This is just a back of the envelope guess. Right? Depending on the scope, the size of the team, it may take longer. It may take shorter. But that was kind of a a line in the sand starting point when someone asked, well, how long do you give it? It’s about six months. And based on the scope, once you do the workshop that we’ll talk about in a second, you can better understand it. The other comment I wanna make about that six months is that don’t let the size of the team dictate the timeline. You may have 20 people that use their prior CRM, but it may be a very basic use. They may primarily use manage some leads in there through a marketing tool, have their sales reps entering opportunities in there, but then everything else is kinda done manually. So shifting that out isn’t as big of a deal. You may have a team of five where everything is tightly integrated through that entire chain from for themselves. So moving their lead to cash chain into your lead to cash chain could be highly disruptive. So make sure you look at not just the number of people, but the complexity of the systems that they’re using as part of this migration.

So the framework, we talked about why. What are you gonna do about it? Workshop. So the vision statement for the workshop is kind of why are we here. And the bottom line is that for the lead to cash process for the company you required, the goal is to map out current state end to end. How do they do work now so that you can create a future state of what they’re going to do later and what the deadline is? Typically, what I found to work well is to think about it in three phases because it groups together related teams. Those are the friends that you were making earlier in the in the presentation. Lead to contract, marketing, sales, contracts are typically involved in those types of conversations along with finance. You have onboarding and implementations. How does the customer get onboarded, implemented so that they can access the service? And then service. How does the customer reach out? Do you use email? Do you use phone calls? Those teams typically work together. So those are typically the three phases for it. End product. Two things. One, a clear understanding for teams of how to execute work now and upon a successful migration, and two, a future state map that will allow you to identify the action items to meet that target date. This is your goal to get the gang altogether, have different people talking to to each other so that they understand what do they do now and what are they going to do in the future to help it be successful. One of the most important pieces of this is a tech stack overview. What tools does the company that you bought use? What do they use for marketing? What’s their CRM tool? Where do they manage their fulfillment or operational database from? How do they build a customer? How do they manage incentives? You need to figure out what you’re moving from and what are you moving to. And this goes back to you have to view this as a full implementation. It’s it’s a it’s a CRM migration where you have to do your due diligence on everything.

Now I wanted to provide a sample list of workshop attendees. It’s a table with empty cells, which typically drives me nuts, but it was a much cleaner look than having a bulleted list that was different sizes, and I couldn’t get it quite right. So I went with this, so I hope you’ll forgive me for the empty cells. So you again, you think about it as kind of those three buckets, lead to contract, operations or onboarding, customer service, and then support teams. Now the support teams, I didn’t mention earlier as part of those three phases, but they’re critical because they typically underlie everything. Security is going to make sure that the applications are managed securely. Finance needs to understand where they’re going to be gain getting data from because they’re going to be looking at, you know, transaction and billing data. They’re also going to be looking at sales data and opportunity data. So they’re kind of underline all of it. Technology is, generically speaking, kind of all of the different tech stacks. So both yours and the company’s, how are they going to manage and rationalize tooling across those for that migration?

So here’s kind of the workshop outline. Like I said, lead sales contracts, onboarding, and then service. So from the workshop perspective, you want to start digging into those details. Because as you dig into those details, that’s going to give you that foundation of knowledge that you need for the future. What are their website capabilities? Do they have web to cast case, web to lead? What’s their marketing automation platform? How are they managing leads routing? From the sales perspective, account, contact, opportunity, quote, territory, billing incentives, kind of the bread and butter of the sales functions, Then contracts is submission and signing. Onboarding. How are they onboarded? What platforms are they boarded into? How do those platforms talk to billing? Are all great questions to discuss during that portion of the workshop. And then finally, service. How do they get requests, and what applications do they use to support the case so that they can manage the data necessary? And underlying all of that is account and product information. Where do they manage accounts? Do they have a master account database, or is it just within their CRM? How or do they have accounts in their CRM? Do they have accounts in billing where it’s kind of a mishmash that you’ll have to figure out how to map it into your platform as well as a product’s perspective? We’ll talk both about both of those more in the next phase from the project planning perspective.

So once you kinda have an understanding of what’s their tech stack, how do they do work, what tools do they use, who are the different teams, A critical part is power user interviews. So as part of that workshop, you were meeting different teams. You met their sales team. You met their service team. You met their operations team. Finding key power users within each of those groups is critical because it allows you to earn their trust that will then spread to the rest of the team. If you can take one of those power users, make sure that they feel like you understand their feelings, you understand their needs, you set a positive tone, it’s going to make everything a lot easier. I think a lot of the success of Equifax’s m and a migrations came from this, setting a positive tone, making sure people feel heard and seen and validated because they’re going through a massive change. Acquisitions can be very scary. They’re I like to always assume good intentions. Right? Your company was acquired because it’s rocking awesome. And the company that acquired it wants your rocking awesome people and your rocking awesome technology and your rocking awesome clients, but it’s still scary. So understanding that and being sensitive to it and having them view you as a trusted partner in this and not a, I’m going to force you into our systems whether you like it or not, creates a very difficult moment for everyone versus, hey. Let’s work together on this. Right? There are things that you can’t change. Equifax has the tools that we have. Your company has the tools that you have. There’s going to be certain ways that things are done. Change is inevitable. But how you approach that change and making people feel seen and heard and validated during that change is what can really make your program successful.

So we talked about the workshop. You got to meet some people. You got to understand how they do things. What are you going to do with all that information? That is a go live checklist. This is the plan for success. Literally, it’s what I wrote on the slide. So three goals. The first, you’re going to track progress against seven different project components that we will talk about shortly. And the other goal is to support weekly change management meetings. So do you remember all those friends that you made internally and at the acquired customer, those power users? You’re going to have a weekly meeting to get everybody together, and this is a chance for open, honest, transparent communication. I would say, let’s stop things from becoming things all the time. Because when you’re going through an acquisition, there’s a great opportunity for backside conversations, you know, people kinda talking behind each other’s back, uncertainty, gossip drifting in, people feeling unseen, like, hey. We’re saying this and nobody’s listening. This weekly call changes that whole tone because you invite everybody. Everyone gets a seat at the table. They may not choose to come to the table, but you at least give them a seat at it so that they can be a part of the conversation. And then by taking that, rolling up the data at a high level, you can then give that to leadership and show them the progress that you’re making.

So what are the project components that I mentioned? First one, account mastering. The acquired company has Walmart Inc. Do you have Walmart Incorporated? You need to make sure that you’re speaking the same language. And then also thinking about that lead to cash chain, you wanna make sure that there’s consistency throughout. So the sales team is selling to the company that operations onboarding, that service is supporting, and that billing is sending a bill to. And this is one of those foundational data pieces to make sure that as you move down the line and prepare to do a fuller migration, everything is ready to go. Product mastering. In our case, we have a master product database that we use, so we would add a acquired company’s products into that. However that works for you, make sure to get that acquired company’s products in there. Because, again, if you think about that lead to cash chain, you need products there so that sales knows how to sell the products and can add them to the opportunities. Pricing knows how to make sure that the pricing for those products stays consistent so that as quotes get built and opportunities get sold and bills get sent out, those products are being built properly. Operations needs to know how to implement the customer. If in their CRM, they get a list of five products that would tell the company would tell operations what to implement, and they migrate into your CRM and now not getting they’re only getting two products with different names. It’s going to be hard for them to implement the customer. Then from the billing perspective, the customer is used to saying, you know, x y z, a b c, d e f on their invoice, and now we’re seeing different product names. Are they understanding what they’re being billed for? So having that product information set up and structured is critical. So you have that kind of foundational data element that walks through all of it. Data migration. What are you moving? Looking at what data does the acquired company capture that you need to migrate over. Accounts, contacts, opportunities, assets, fulfillment IDs, custom objects. Now this conversation is one of the most crucial conversations where being able to have transparency, honestly, accountability is so important because data migration is very hard, and you will not be able to move everything over. For example, service data. We typically don’t ingest legacy service data into our CRM. What we do is make sure that we export it and have it in a secure storage place so that you can get to that information still. But, usually, people are like, what? I won’t be able to just search it? Unfortunately, no. But we’ll make sure that you have access to it. So, again, this is where having those relationships. If you were if you have a partnership and you tell that to someone, they trust you because you’ve proven yourself that you’re accountable and that this is my experience. This is why we do it this way. This is how it will work for you. Do you have any concerns? And you may not be able to address all their concerns, but they will at least feel heard and seen and validated as part of that. System configuration. This is the day to day fun. Pick list values, new fields, custom flows, Apex. Do you need new page layouts? Do they need new profiles, permission sets? Everything that’s needed to make the system work for the acquired company. Because, again, a lot of times, they have different business procedures. They have different data elements that they need to capture. Uh, Uh, in one case, there was a contract element that can drive a service outcome. So we needed to understand how can we make sure that that contract element is visible to service agents. It required a system change, but it was critical to helping that team meet a need that they had for reviewing information as they are servicing a customer. Sales user. If you think about the sales user, these are the ones that will help the company achieve the cross sell goals and to help the company realize the deal value for why they made the acquisition or went through the merger, but they’re also the ones that are talking to the customers. And if you make them feel positive about the future of the company and what’s changing, then they will transfer that positivity to their customers as well. So there’s three kind of tenets for making sure. Make sure that they can do what they need to do. Sales users get frustrated. Their job their skills tend to lie in talking to customers and working with them to identify the right solutions for them and helping them see how they can make the most of your company’s products. So you wanna make sure that they can do what they need to do with minimal disruptions. They also want constant communication. What is changing? When? And how will they be supported throughout the change by providing comprehensive training and ongoing support? Like I said earlier, this is not a one and done. This is an ongoing support. You’re welcoming them warmly into the company, and then you’re integrating them in warmly into your company as well post migration. I’m gonna say the same thing about service users. Service users are a very important part of the company because they’re the ones on the front end helping your customers on a day to day basis. So like I said, they will help resolve customer issues and make sure customers feel taken care of during the change. Make it a positive experience for them by ensuring users are convenient to have all their necessary access. They need to be able to log cases. They need to be able to review the data that they need access to, make sure that they understand what is changing, when, and how they will be supported through it. They might have to learn new tools. They may have to learn new procedures. They’d want to know that they can have the information that they need to make it through that post go live so that they can be successful in their role. And training and post live support. I touched on a little bit this from the sales and service user perspective, but this also goes to the broader audience as well. So, typically, from my experience working directly in Salesforce, I would partner with the other groups. Like, I would partner with marketing and operations as part of this change. So as we work with our core set of sales and service users, we would want to have consistent communication leading up to the go live date, what to expect, when to expect it, providing comprehensive training, and most importantly, coordinating it with the other groups so that it’s kind of a one false swoop to get everything in there. Because from the marketing perspective, they need to be able to get those leads to those sales users and manage their campaigns efficiently. So we will wanna make sure that that transition from the sales side was coordinated with the marketing side. And once everyone’s live in the tool, we would have a hypercare process afterwards. Again, viewing it as a full implementation. What’s going well? What could be improved? What’s your kinda urgent needs? What did we miss as part of the migration? And being open about what did I miss during the migration, again, will help build trust and make sure that everyone can be successful moving forward. Now, eventually, you have to transition to operational support. So one of my favorite messages and one that I’m trying to remember is to begin with the end in mind. What does success look like? And how can we say, yes. We have successfully done this full implementation migration. We are all exhausted, but we stop things from becoming things, and we did it with transparency and accountability, and we can feel really, really good about it. What does the transition to BAU and business as usual meet? Because this is not forever. Typically, project teams roll off. So how do you kind of move them into the way that you do things day to day? For us, we have a support site that users can use to submit cases to us, and everyone has access to that, and they were all trained on it. And that’s our tool for managing it so they know how to get a hold of us once the acquisition is complete.

So what’s next? So since this is a recorded session, I cannot do question and answers, but I will say that you have the opportunity to help your company and other employees, and I’m reading this verbatim because it’s it’s great, navigate a complex hard process to make sure your company meets its goals, uh, who humanely helping people through a big change management process. So the three things that you should remember, do a workshop, get everybody in a room, Talk to each other. Build relationships. Drive trust. Once that’s done, make a project plan so that you know what needs to be accomplished to support this, again, full migration. Three, have a go live checklist so that you know what you’re what date you’re targeting, how you’re going to meet it, make sure that everybody’s included. I have a a worksheet in my project plan, and it’s just a list of names. And it’s all the people that I’ve talked with and what area they support. And anytime another one would come up, I would just keep building it out. Now I have a group of people that I’ve worked with that we can collaborate on and have that go live checklist. I also have my LinkedIn information up there. I am more than happy to connect with you and talk m and a. I was excited to get this presentation because m and a was the hardest, but also most fulfilling things I have ever done in my career. And I want to share what we what we have learned with other people so that they can be successful as well. So I love talking m and a and hope that if you’re struggling and need a listening ear, please come find me, and let’s let’s talk about it. And thanks to our incredible sponsors. Alright. I appreciate your time and attention for listening to this recording, and I hope you have a great and fantastic rest of your day.