Three acquisitions, three meanings of "qualified"

Ask three newly acquired sales teams what a qualified opportunity is and you'll get three answers. One means the customer has agreed to a demo. One means there's budget and a decision date. One means whatever the rep feels it means.

Add them up into a group pipeline and the number is meaningless. Present it to the board and you've got a problem that'll take a year to come out.

The common mistake

Most groups start sales integration with systems. One CRM, one instance, migrate everything. It feels like progress and it's easy to project-manage.

But moving three sets of inconsistent data into one system gives you one system full of inconsistent data. The definitions underneath haven't changed. The reports look unified and mean nothing.

Start with the words

I spent several years running weekly business reviews across 20 operating companies, holding each MD and sales leader to the same set of metrics. The thing that made that possible wasn't the technology. It was agreeing what the words meant.

Before anything else, agree:

what each pipeline stage means, and the test for moving between them;

what "committed" means in a forecast;

how ARR is counted, including multi-year, ramped and one-off deals;

what counts as a renewal, an upsell and a new logo.

It sounds dull. It's the single most important thing you'll do, because everything else sits on it. It also tends to surface where the acquired businesses were telling themselves a kinder story than the data supports. Better to find that out early.

Then the rhythm

Once the definitions are agreed, get every business onto the same weekly and monthly rhythm. The same forecast call, the same format, on the same day. The same monthly review, measuring each business on the same handful of numbers.

You'll learn more about the acquired businesses in the first six weeks of a shared weekly review than in the whole of diligence. Which teams call their forecast accurately. Which ones sandbag. Which ones have a pipeline that's mostly hope.

Then the comp plan

Comp is the most sensitive thing to change and the most important to get right. Different plans in different businesses pay for different behaviour, and sellers notice when the business next door is paid better for the same work.

Don't change it mid-year unless something is badly broken. Use the first plan year after acquisition to understand what each plan rewards, then move everyone onto one set of principles at the next plan year. The mechanics can vary by business. What you're paying for shouldn't.

Then the contracts

Every acquisition brings its own contract paper. Different terms, different uplift clauses, different renewal mechanics, sometimes no uplift clause at all. Over time, that's a lot of value left on the table.

The tidy way to fix it is at renewal. Each renewal is a chance to move the customer onto the group's current terms, ideally with a longer commitment. It won't happen by itself; it needs a rule and someone who owns it.

Then, finally, the systems

By now, you know what you're migrating to. The definitions are agreed, the rhythm is running and people trust the numbers. Consolidating the CRM becomes a technical job instead of an argument about what everything means.

For investors

If you're early in a buy-and-build, this is worth deciding before the second acquisition, not after the fourth. Each new business is easier to bring in when there's a standard to bring it into. And when you come to sell, a buyer's diligence team will test exactly this: whether the group's pipeline and ARR mean the same thing across every business. Better to have the answer ready.

Veridian works with PE investors and their portfolio companies on revenue advisory, including bringing acquisitions onto one operating rhythm.