Industry: Telecommunications Situation: M&A Due Diligence
The Situation
A client I’d worked with for years started asking for a lot of revenue reports.
Contract waterfall analysis. Cohort retention by vintage. Future revenue by contract term. The same numbers sliced by product line, by channel, by customer segment. Then they needed everything sliced a different way. Then again.
After the third round of “can you also break this out by…” I finally asked what was going on.
They were selling the company.
(In my defense, I’m a Salesforce architect, not a detective. But in hindsight, “urgent cohort analysis” was a clue.)
The Challenge
Here’s the thing about a 10-year-old company entering due diligence: the data lived in three different systems. ServiceNow from the early days. Salesforce from the growth phase. A billing system that didn’t talk to either.
Buyer requests required:
- Contract waterfall analysis showing revenue progression over time
- Cohort retention analysis by customer vintage
- Future contract revenue projections by term
- All metrics sliced by product line, channel, and customer segment—multiple ways
The data existed, but it had never been consolidated or reconciled across systems.
The Approach
We spent months consolidating, reconciling, and building reports that could withstand buyer scrutiny. This wasn’t just reporting—it was forensic data work, tracing revenue history across system migrations and ensuring every number could be defended.
The good news: we’d spent years getting their Salesforce data model right. Recurring revenue tracking, proper Opportunity structures, clean account hierarchies. That foundation made the due diligence possible. Without it, the timeline would have been significantly longer—or the gaps might have affected valuation.
The Outcome
- Company sold successfully
- Due diligence data requests answered with defensible, reconciled reports
- Established better data model and cleansing practices along the way
- Improved some sales and delivery processes as a byproduct
Key Takeaway
Every shortcut—the Opportunity with “TBD” in the product field, the contract terms buried in a PDF attachment, the renewal that happened over email and never got logged—becomes a liability when someone’s writing a check for your company.
Why This Matters for Growth-Stage Companies
The good news? Fixing this isn’t an “exit prep” project. It’s just running good revenue operations. The M&A readiness comes free.
For founders thinking about an exit in the next 2-3 years: your recurring revenue metrics will be stress-tested. Is your CRM ready for that?
The data quality that closes your next deal is the same data quality that closes your exit.