Merging Salesforce (SFDC) Instances
Overview
There are several critical considerations to discuss if you need to merge Salesforce (SFDC) instances. You'll find answers to key questions and our best practice recommendations below, but please reach out to your Clari CSM to partner with us through these changes.
Whose SFDC instance should we use?
The most common scenario we see is an existing Clari customer wants to bring a newly-acquired company's data into their own SFDC instance — this is the faster of the two options. If you would rather use your newly acquired company's SFDC instance instead, then Clari needs to be re-implemented.
When should we merge the data between the two organizations?
We recommend merging the data between two SFDC instances at the beginning of a quarter; choose a few days when there will not be many people logging into the system (i.e. a weekend). We recommend merging contacts, accounts, and opportunities separately across a couple of days.
How much data and what data should we merge?
We recommend that you merge all contacts and accounts. In the case of opportunities, we recommend merging all open and closed-won opportunities. Lost deals are optional — these opportunities usually represent a lot of data, very little of which will be used.
If the company that has been acquired has informative data on why opportunities were lost, then it may be useful to merge lost deals for these insights. It is important to understand that field history cannot be migrated from one SFDC instance to another; merging opportunity data allows your organization to see historical opportunities in your SFDC instance without field history for those opportunities.
Do we need a field on the opportunity to identify the old opportunities from the merged company?
Clari strongly recommends this because merged opportunities have no history after they are merged to a new instance. We can use this field in filters to exclude historical deals that came from the acquired company in order to segment them for the Analytics Modules. We recommend creating a checkbox field to identify these opportunities.
Where should we put the merged team(s) in the Role/Territory Hierarchy?
We recommend placing the merged team(s) in their own node under the CEO. This allows the merged team to be easily included or excluded from Analytics, Dashboards, Forecasting, etc. This also prevents the new team from impacting the projection and forecasting rollups. As the teams become integrated, they can be moved out of this node.
How should we handle the email domain of new users?
- Scenario A. (recommended) The newly acquired company changes their email domain to the existing Clari customer's, and adopts the login strategy used by the existing Clari customer.
- Scenario B. The newly acquired company (regardless of their email domain) will be using the existing Clari customer’s SSO to create new users. The new users should be able to authenticate using their original domain.
- Scenario C. If the current customer has acquired a company who will not be using their domain and is not using SSO, all users from the new domain need to be provisioned through User Management.
- Scenario D. a current Clari customer is changing their email domain to the acquired company's email domain. Open a support ticket to transition your existing Clari users over to the new email addresses.
What should we do about the acquired company's email and SSO provider?
Clari can support only one email provider (i.e. Gmail OR Exchange) and one SSO provider/account per instance.
Supported configurations for one instance of Clari:
- Two Exchange or Gmail Domains + one SSO account that both companies use
- Two Exchange or Gmail Domains + one company with SSO enabled and one company without SSO enabled
- Two Exchange or Gmail Domains + no SSO enabled
If you would like to use two different email providers and/or have two separate SSOs enabled, then you will need to use two separate instances of Clari.
What Sales applications that the acquired company is using can we pull into Clari?
We’re able to include all of your applications if you would like. We just need to know which applications the acquired company uses so no data is lost.
Should we segment the CRM Score between our companies?
We recommend that you do not segment your CRM Scores. Although the score may be inaccurate at first, in a short period of time the model will normalize and become accurate once more. If you decide to segment the CRM Score between companies, then the model will not learn how to incorporate the scores.
