All right, so at this point in the process, you have come to understand the ins and outs of what systems, processes, and data you will be porting over. Now, there are two more things left to consider:

1. Technical Debt in your own system and the impacts this will have on the migration
2. Change Management and all of the fun that comes with that phrase

Let’s start with tech debt. If you have been around my site for a while, you know I have had to do a few tech debt projects in my career. I think they are fun, but most people find them costly and time-consuming. They are generally one of the most complicated projects to put an ROI to, and thus, many companies like to postpone and postpone until literally at the point of breakage. However, acquiring a company, particularly one with good data and infrastructure, can be a point to reflect and decide to embark on your own tech debt journey. It does not need to be a full-blown, clean entire system, but relatively small bite-size projects that align with the changes that will be brought into the existing system from the acquired company.

Think about it this way, say the company acquired has a fully streamlined quoting process, and yours is a bit of a mess, and no one is following the processes. Rather than dump the good into the bad, this can be an opportunity to clean up the fields, data, and processes in your Salesforce and implement a new method incorporating what has worked well at the acquired company. It would make sense to perform the cleanup before implementation and migration as it will save the overhead of mixed-matched data.

Moving on to change management. Once the implementation and migration are complete, the new and old users must clearly understand what is expected of them and how the systems work. Even the existing folks at the acquiring company need to understand what data was brought over, if any definitions changed, and/or if any process changes were implemented.

As for the people who have been brought in, they must understand the processes they are supposed to follow and feel included in how things are supposed to work – where the data goes, how they quote the product, etc. They will have all had a different way of doing things, even if you took some of their processes, so they must be informed of the changes and provided clear training to do their jobs successfully. This ensures that people are not left scrambling to understand what’s happening and that work continuity can be maintained. Lastly, while doing all of this won’t prevent churn of those employees, it will definitely help.