Many organizations strategically expand, grow, invest, hedge and capture market share through merger and acquisitions. A challenge that is often faced in M&A is how to digitally onboard people, processes and technology for both the parent company and the acquired or merged entity.
At Uptima, we work with many organizations who are active in M&A or are part of a private equity portfolio and a metric we hear regularly is “we need to onboard our acquisitions in 30 days” or “we are in the process of offboarding one of our entities and we don’t know how to detangle at the technology level.”
So far in this series, we have discussed many ways in which Salesforce empowers organizations from lead to revenue. Salesforce continues to prove itself a powerhouse in M&A because it is a dynamic, flexible platform that can be set up to support the activities and financial strategy needed when organizations blend.
In this article, we will discuss two of the most common scenarios in M&A. First is the complete acquisition where the acquired and acquiring entities become one. The second is a flip. This is where a company is acquired, restructured and flipped for a profit or a loss – and yes, losses are sometimes intentional!
Salesforce houses critical business data. Everything from customer, account, opportunity, revenue activities, contract management, service entitlements, dispatch, asset tracking, reporting, forecasting, analytics and more – the sky’s the limit – in a highly configurable, single or multiple org environment.
When an entity is acquiring another, one thing to consider is how similar or different their digital footprints are. If these entities are to function as one, they need to be harmonious at the technology stack level.
When Salesforce is set up leveraging sturdy governance founded in thought leadership and best practices, organizations benefit tremendously from having a stable environment that creates rapid ease of onboarding a new book of business with speed and agility in a unified org.
But what if we are acquiring an entity we intend to flip? We need to be mindful of keeping a certain level of bifurcation while still being able to report, forecast, and analyze key business data.
Salesforce has the ability to address this scenario in a multi org approach. What this allows organizations to do is keep their acquired entity in a separate org or “holding tank” until it is ready to be sold.
This way a separate set of books is also reasonably straightforward to maintain since the relationship between the Salesforce org and the General Ledger is 1 to 1.
Salesforce is the largest and most popular customer relationship management software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.
Organizations using Salesforce are acquiring and merging with other Salesforce oriented businesses, and this eliminates some complexity in M&A, and it’s certainly part of the decision making process when an organization is being considered for acquisition.
For more details about our 7-part series, visit our original post here: https://uptima.com/our-new-series-the-office-of-the-cfo-enabled-through-salesforce/
Written by Alex Bell, Chief Strategy Officer at Uptima