Choosing to run parallel Salesforce orgs after an acquisition feels like the pragmatic path. Your teams need stability to hit their numbers. The acquisition has already created enough disruption. Why add a risky technical migration on top of it?
But stability has a shelf life. Within six months, the costs start to exceed the benefits—and by month twelve, you’re actively losing revenue. If your goal is to grow as one company, running two (or more) orgs will prevent the very revenue growth and market expansion you merged for.
3 Hidden Costs of Running Multiple Salesforce Orgs
Sales Reps Stop Checking Both Systems
When reps have to swivel-chair between two instances to see if a prospect is already a customer, they eventually stop checking both. Quotas get missed. Cross-sell opportunities disappear.
Customer Support Sees Only Half the Picture
A high-value client calls with an issue. The rep can see their support history but not their purchase history—that’s in the other org. You risk losing customers you just paid millions to acquire.
Executive Data Requires Manual Labor
The CEO wants to see the full pipeline, but the CFO’s forced to manually export data from two systems into Excel to reconcile the numbers. The data is often a week old before the meeting even starts.
None of these are technical failures. They’re what happens when you try to operate as one company while running two systems. Eventually, one of three things happens: reps stop trying, executives stop trusting the data, or you start the merge.
Why Salesforce Migrations Fail: The Role of Undefined Operating Rules
Most leadership teams delay an org merge because they don’t want to take on the technical risk. It’s a real concern—migrations do fail when teams aren’t aligned.
But what actually derails merges are undefined policies and operating rules. The hardest part is getting your executive team to agree on how the combined company should actually operate.
Take the goal to “enable cross-selling.” It sounds clear, but you can’t build anything until someone decides how this will actually work. Will you train every rep to sell the full portfolio (generalists), or will you run specialist pods with a “prime” and “co-prime” account executive? These are very different go-to-market motions—each requires a different approach to compensation, opportunity ownership, and territory management.
Salesforce is a binary system. It requires black-and-white rules to function. Avoiding these questions doesn’t make them go away—it just moves the cost from your conference room to your P&L.
The Salesforce Org Merge Decision Framework
Our The Salesforce Org Merge Decision Framework guides these conversations to a resolution. It walks your Sales, Marketing, and Service leaders through key policy decisions across six strategic areas:
- Go-to-Market Strategy: Determining if you need separate systems or an open security model.
- Pricing & Packaging: Deciding between maintaining legacy lists or a unified CPQ model.
- The Operating Model: Defining record “ownership” to prevent territory wars.
- GTM Enablement: Shaping how you enable teams (pods vs. generalists) post-merger.
- Technology Strategy: Evaluating which legacy tech stays and what gets retired.
- Change Readiness: Assessing whether to use a phased rollout or a “big bang” push.
Once you’ve made these decisions, the technical work can begin.
The 4-Phase Roadmap for Strategic Consolidation
Once you’ve defined those rules, we recommend a four-phase approach:
Phase 1: Data Deduplication & Business Rule Alignment
Before moving a record, you must find where your two companies are already colliding. Using your new business rules—like which account naming convention wins—you clean up duplicates and conflicts before migration, not after.
Phase 2: Consolidating Global Sales Workflows
This is your chance to consolidate conflicting sales processes into unified workflows that reflect how you want to sell. You’re building the sales process you actually want, not just copying what you inherited.
Phase 3: Cross-Sell Visibility & Data Integration
By migrating your highest-potential business units first, your teams can finally see the complete customer relationship. Reps can identify cross-sell opportunities they couldn’t see before. Support can resolve issues faster with the full account history. Account managers can coordinate renewals and expansions across the entire portfolio. Within 90 days, this visibility begins to generate results.
Phase 4: Reducing Technical Debt & Record Type Consolidation
Consolidation is your opportunity to eliminate the record types, fields, and workflows that accumulated over the years but no longer serve a purpose. We worked with a services firm managing 114 distinct record types. After consolidation, they simplified down to 27—a 76% reduction. Reps could find what they needed in seconds rather than minutes, and support could finally see the full customer history on a single screen.
Next Steps: Moving From Strategy to Technical Execution
For most companies, the turning point comes when the operational friction becomes more expensive than the technical risk.
Our Decision Framework guides your leadership team through the policy areas that must be resolved before you can merge. It captures the specific business requirements your technical team needs to execute the consolidation and deliver the revenue growth and market expansion you merged for.
