Revenue Roadshow · San Francisco · 16 September

One Company,
Two Systems

A post-acquisition consolidation, worked live by the people who have to sign one.

How the afternoon runs

01The deal, and your first decision — before anyone explains anything
02Five turns — reconciliation, migration, comp, the customer, the people
03The coalition — who has to say yes
04Three collisions — where the decisions contradict
05The close — one decision you take home

One operating model in six months.
Not one CRM in six months.

Six weeks ago the deal closed. The integration did not.

The deal on your desk · six weeks after close

NorthBridge AI has acquired ContractIQ

NorthBridge AI The acquirer · Boston

$54M ARR · 380 people · 1,200 logos
Contract intelligence for the buy side: legal and procurement
Runs Salesforce

ContractIQ The acquired · Denver · founder-led

$24M ARR · 140 people · 650 logos
Contract analytics for the sell side: revenue teams
Runs HubSpot

$78Mcombined ARR31%blended growth520people1,850logos$120Min 24 months, the Granite Ridge target

Six weeks after close, before any integration plan

One CRM. One source of truth. Within six months. Marcus Hale, PE operating partner

Burning right now, to run one company twice

$700K

A year. $1.8M of tooling that consolidates to about $1.1M. Two pipelines, two forecasts, two answers to every question.

Post-acquisition tech-stack audit · six weeks after close

Two systems, nine categories

Category	NorthBridge acquirer	ContractIQ acquired
CRM	Salesforce Enterprise	HubSpot Professional
Marketing automation	Marketo	HubSpot Marketing Hub
Sales engagement	Outreach	Apollo.io
Conversation intelligence	Gong	None: manual call notes
Revenue intelligence	Clari	None: spreadsheet forecasting
Customer success	Gainsight	Airtable and Zapier, custom-built
CPQ and billing	DealHub + NetSuite	PandaDoc + Stripe
Data enrichment	ZoomInfo	Clearbit
BI and analytics	Tableau on Snowflake	Google Sheets + Metabase

Combined $1.8M a yearConsolidated $1.1M a year$700Kof annual redundancy, flagged by the PE firm

For the next two hours

You are Vanessa Okafor

CRO of the combined company. 2.1% equity, worth eight to twelve million at the target exit. Ten days until you take the board a consolidation plan.

Before anyone explains anything

You have ten days.
What do you do first?

Write it on your card. One line, nobody sees it. Then we find out how much this room disagrees.

The people in the room

Every system decision today is a decision about one of them.

Vanessa Okafor, CRO. Elena Vasquez, CFO. Marcus Hale, the PE operating partner. Derek Huang, VP RevOps. Daniel Cho, the founder. Mark Sullivan and Tara Mills carry the two sales orgs. Janet Brooks pays you $310K and renews in month four. Remember the faces.

For the next two hours, this is you

Vanessa Okafor

CRO · NorthBridge

Controls: The revenue architecture, and the only plan the board will see.
Wants: A sequence she can defend, and the ten days to build it.
At stake: 2.1% equity, worth $8–12M at the target exit. And the seat.

Turn 1 · the ally

Elena Vasquez

CFO

Controls: NetSuite, Stripe, and the only numbers a diligence firm will accept.
Wants: A reconciliation she can sign, and no billing migration on a CRM timeline.
Costs you: Reconcile on her ground and you gain someone who outranks the org chart. Go around her and the bridge gets built without you.

The clock

Marcus Hale

PE Operating Partner · Granite Ridge

Controls: The mandate, the capital, and the calendar.
Wants: One CRM, one source of truth, six months. $120M in twenty-four.
Costs you: He runs integrations professionally, across a portfolio. You run one. He is pressure to convert, not an obstacle to survive.

The trap

Pick a CRM and migrate

It relieves the pressure fast, which is exactly why everyone reaches for it. It is a symptom fix: the real work atrophies, and two ops teams become adversaries defending their own definitions and their own comp. The leverage was never the database.

Five stages of one motion, not five tools

01Reconcile what we have — diligence; gates everything below
02Migrate to the survivor — risk; protects the plan
03Install the operating model — EBITDA; comp is direct margin
04Activate the merged base — NRR; the heaviest lever
05Carry the people through it — the constraint on all four

Turn 1 · Reconciliation

The number
nobody can trust

It decides whether any other number in the room is real.

Sterling Aerospace · one account, four systems

Line	Contract	CRM	Provisioned	Billed
Core Platform	$124K	$124K	$124K	$118K
Analytics Add-on	$96K	$102K	$90K	$96K
Premium Support	$90K	$90K	$84K	$87K
Account	$310K	$316K	$298K	$301K

Four systems, four numbers, one customer. The gap between CRM and billed, the recognised number, is $15K — 4.7%.

4.7% across a $78M book

$3.7M

Of revenue drift no roll-up will show you. And none of it is a duplicate-contact problem — a dedup pass would never touch it.

The principle

One authoritative source per metric, not one database

Pipeline: CRM
Revenue: ERP (billing sub)
Health: CS platform
Lead: MAP
Activity: Capture tool

Which means a defensible reconciliation can be built across two CRMs. Reconciliation is a measurement problem, not a migration problem.

The reconciliation bridge

From CRM-reported ARR to audited revenue

The $78M combined ARR is two CRM numbers never tied to one ledger. A quality-of-earnings firm steps it down line by line. The gap is the variance the CRO must explain at exit.

$78M

CRM-reported ARR

Duplicate-logo adjustment

Bookings to billings timing

ASC 606 recognition

Audited recognised revenue

Variancethe dollars the CRO owns at the QoE exit

Schematic: only the $78M is stated; the step-downs are illustrative.

Elena Vasquez · CFO

That bridge gets built on her ground.

She owns NetSuite, Stripe and the diligence bridge. Reconcile on her terms, with her numbers, verified, and you gain an ally who outranks the org chart. That is the first coalition move of the day, and the first deposit.

Turn 2 · Migration risk

Clean before
you cut over

Protects the plan. Creates no value. Skipped anyway, every time.

What you are migrating

Duplicate contacts, acquired side: ~30%
Required-field fill: 55%
Gate targets before cutover: ≤5% · ≥85%

HubSpot's Deal is not a drop-in for the Opportunity — ad-hoc line items against a price book, many companies against one account — so deals are re-modelled rather than copied. Stage history does not travel: two years of velocity baseline restarts at cutover. Six integrations break.

The sequence, and the one gate that fails most plans

G1Clean · dedup · identity — upstream of the migration
G2Field map + object remodel
G3Migrate — only on a proven sandbox dedup
G4Reconcile — a documented bridge to audited revenue
G5Dashboards — trusted data before anyone forecasts

Clean data before migration. Trusted data before dashboards.

Turn 2 · the wound

Derek Huang

VP RevOps · battlefield-promoted

Controls: The eight people who will run whatever you design.
Wants: To be right about the data, and not to be exposed.
Costs you: He called the acquired data “not ready for institutional use.” Right about the data, wrong about the people.

Derek Huang · VP RevOps, battlefield-promoted

He called their data "not ready for institutional use."

He was right about the data and wrong about the people. Both cost you; only one shows up in the sandbox. Heard from the acquired side, data cleanup sounds like your work was garbage. Migration is a change-management exercise wearing a technical costume.

Turn 3 · Operating model and comp

One company,
one operating model

Comp is direct margin. This is the structural centre of the afternoon.

Two plans, two armies

NorthBridge · 50/50 · 32 AEs: ~$240K OTE
ContractIQ · 60/40 · 8 AEs: ~$190K OTE
Current combined: $9.20M
Harmonise at $230K: EBITDA-neutral
Harmonise at $240K: +$400K/yr
Parallel-run quarter, one-time: +$280K

Quota-retirement rules differ, so the same booked dollar retires differently depending on which plan a rep is on.

What $400K a year is actually buying

AEs flagged at risk: 3 of 8
ARR they carry: ~$9.0M
Backfill and ramp: ~$1.1M
Founder earnout at ≥90% retention: $4.0M

Turn 3 · the larger book

Mark Sullivan

VP Sales · NorthBridge

Controls: 32 AEs on $240K at fifty-fifty, and the bigger half of the revenue.
Wants: No change to a plan that is already working for his team.
Costs you: Harmonising down trims thirty-two OTEs by $10K each. Buy retention on one side and flight risk appears on the other.

Turn 3 · the kitchen table

Tara Mills

Sales Lead · ContractIQ

Controls: Nothing on the org chart. She is one of the eight.
Wants: Not to take a pay cut for an acquisition she did not choose.
Costs you: Three of eight are flagged at risk, carrying ~$9.0M. Hers is the kitchen table the comp plan lands on.

Where a comp plan actually lands

A kitchen table, at night, next to a calculator and a family photo.

The 60/40 reps will read any change as a pay cut until you show them the math. To you it is architecture. To her it is the mortgage. The dual-run quarter is how that becomes a deposit instead of a withdrawal.

$78M to $120M in 24 months

Requires 24% compound.
You already grow 31%.

Business as usual reaches about $134M and overshoots the target. The plan is conservative on purpose: it pre-funds integration drag. Disciplined that is −$8M. Botched, −$26M.

A botched migration is the only thing that misses a conservative target. This was never an upside bet.

Turn 4 · Cross-sell and retention

The customer
is in the room

1,850 logos keep paying you while you rewire underneath them.

The $12M synergy line

Already buy both — the beachhead: ~180
Addressable on the other side: ~1,500
Year-1 wins × incremental ACV: ~120 × $40K
Year 1: $4.8M
Cumulative by month 24: $12M

This is a new motion into a different buying center, not a warm expansion. Treating it as one is how the synergy line quietly misses.

The exposure nobody models

Renewals inside the migration window: 140 · $5.2M
At peak risk, months 3–4: $2.3M
4-pt GRR slip on the $24M acquired book: ~$960K/yr

Same order of magnitude as the productivity risk everyone does model, and invisible, because nobody put it on the page. Sequence the cutover against the renewal calendar.

Turn 4 · the customer

Janet Brooks

Customer · Sterling Aerospace

Controls: $310K of contracted ARR, renewing in month four.
Wants: Continuity, and one familiar face.
Costs you: 140 accounts like her renew inside the window. A four-point GRR slip is about $960K.

Janet Brooks · Sterling Aerospace

Janet does not care about your migration.

She is the $310K account from Turn 1, and she renews in month four, inside the window where the dashboards go dark. She needs continuity and one familiar face. Schedule the cutover around her calendar, not yours.

Turn 5 · People

Who runs
the system

Tech consolidation never answers this. It is the constraint on everything above.

Eight people now own a stack none of them designed

Inherited RevOps team: 6 + 2 = 8
Develop : backfill : retain: 3 : 1 : 4
Coverage priorities: gates · dashboards · renewals

The single backfill is a skills-fit call, never a performance one. The two acquired staff are the flight risk, and that is a belonging problem, not a headcount line.

Turn 5 · the lever

Daniel Cho

Founder · ContractIQ

Controls: The loyalty of the acquired team.
Wants: His $4.0M earnout, which is retention-gated.
Costs you: “You’ll lose three of the eight” is half self-interest and half alignment. Resistance you can align is a coalition asset.

Daniel Cho · Founder, ContractIQ

"You'll lose three of the eight."

His $4M earnout is retention-gated, so the warning is half self-interest and half alignment. His earnout and your retention plan overlap on the same eight people. Resistance you can align is a coalition asset.

Before you reconcile anything

Your plan is seven conversations before one board meeting

Elenathe CFO, your load-bearing ally, and the one who outranks the org chart
Marcus Halethe PE partner, pressure to convert rather than an obstacle to survive
Daniel Chothe founder, resistance to align, with an earnout pointing your way

This was never just a technology decision. The CRO's job here is coalition building.

And it runs on one currency

The number one currency of a CRO is trust

Deposits +

Reconcile on the CFO's ground, her numbers, verified
Dual-run comp, so nobody's paycheck is a surprise
A named development path for the absorbed team
Renewal continuity promised to customers, and kept

Withdrawals −

Their data called "not ready for institutional use"
A comp change announced without the math
Migrating straight through renewal season
A battlefield promotion with no support behind it

Every decision today was one or the other. The balance walks into the boardroom with you.

Where the decisions contradict

The clean-data gate against the cross-sell start. Which one moves?
The elegant comp model against retention reality. Hold the plan, or bend it for the pod?
CRO, CFO, and the PE partner on decision rights. Who actually decides the cutover sequence?

On the table

12 wk · $380KA · Big-bang

Fastest to unified visibility. 15–20% productivity loss for the quarter.

6 mo · $420KB · Phased

Lower disruption per phase, 5–8% sustained loss. Cross-sell delayed about three months.

$180K + $700K/yrC · Warehouse

Keep both CRMs, federate. Zero productivity disruption; highest long-term operational debt.

yoursD · A synthesis

The one a board actually wants to hear, if you can sequence it.

Three paths to one source of truth

Each path wins a row and pays for it on another

	A · Big-bang 12 weeks · rip the band-aid	B · Phased 6 months · stage the risk	C · Warehouse + identity ongoing · bridge, don't choose
Cost	$380Kone-time	$420K	$180Kplus $700K a year, never ends
Productivity hit	15–20%$0.9–1.2M on the $24M base	5–8%sustained over six months	None
Cross-sell visibility	At cutover	+3 months	~4 weekswiring; matched 6–8 weeks after dedup
One source of truth	Immediate	Phased	Neveralways a reconciliation
The board will say	“the acquirer's system wins”	“6 months is an eternity”	“you're dodging the call”

Defend the one you hold when Hale names the row where it loses; name the path you rejected. Or is the answer even one of these three?

What a strong answer names

The alternative you rejected, and the condition under which it would have been right.
The sequence. Clean data before migration; trusted data before dashboards.
The reconciliation plan, before a diligence firm tests the bridge for you.
The attrition plan. Who leaves, and what that costs.
The customer plan, so the transition stays invisible to the people paying you.

No single leader solved it either

The system is the people who run it.

Your job was never to pick a tool. It was to set the goal, one operating model in six months, and to build the coalition that carries it.

Think about the integration you're actually dreading.

Not this one. Yours. There is one sequencing decision in it you have not written down.

Write it down Monday.

One Company,Two Systems

One operating model in six months.Not one CRM in six months.