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 this stability has a shelf life. Within six months, the costs start to exceed the benefits—and by month twelve, you’ll start losing revenue. If your goal is to grow as one company, running two (or more) orgs will prevent the very growth and market expansion you merged for.
When Stability Starts to Cost You
Sales Reps Stop Checking Both Systems
When reps have to swivel-chair between two instances to see if a prospect’s already a customer, they eventually stop. 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 is 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 is a technical failure. They’re what happens when you try to operate as one company while running multiple systems. Eventually, one of three things happens: users stop trying, executives stop trusting the data, or you start the merge.
The Real Blocker: 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 stakeholders to agree on how the combined company should actually run.
Salesforce is a binary system. It requires black-and-white rules to function. For example:
- How do we credit a cross-sell lead?
- Is an account owned by geography, vertical, or segment?
- Which sales process is the standard?
These aren’t easy questions. They surface real conflicts about territory, comp, and control. But avoiding them doesn’t make them go away—it just moves the cost from your conference room to your P&L.
A Framework to Guide the Decisions
Our Salesforce Org Merge Decision Framework guides these conversations to a resolution. It walks your Sales, Marketing, and Service leaders through key go-to-market decisions—from lead routing rules to account ownership—and produces the specific requirements your tech team needs to build the unified org.
Once you’ve made these decisions, the technical work can begin.
How to Merge Multiple Orgs Without the Meltdown
Once you’ve defined those operating rules, we recommend a four-phase approach:
Phase 1: Stop the Collision
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: Build One Sales Process
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: Unlock Revenue Opportunities
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 starts generating results.
Phase 4: Clear the Clutter
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 instead of minutes, and support could finally see the full customer history on one screen.
From Intent to Execution
For most companies, the turning point comes when the operational friction costs more than the technical risk. Reps keep their own spreadsheets because neither system shows them what they need. Customer data conflicts across orgs. The board wants to see margin improvements from the merger, but you’re still running duplicate infrastructure.
Our Decision Framework walks your leadership team through the six go-to-market areas that need to be defined 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.
