The deal closed. The customer data did not.
Finance consolidates in the first quarter because reporting demands it. The customer layer rarely follows. Each acquired business keeps its own platforms, its own contact rules, and its own version of the same customer. A structured review that establishes what you actually own, where it fragments, and the sequence for bringing it under one operating model.
The problem
Integration plans cover systems, people and reporting lines. The customer relationship is usually assumed to come along with them. It does not.
After the second or third acquisition, the group holds several customer bases that overlap in ways nobody can measure. The same customer exists under different identifiers, different consent records, and different contact rules. Marketing runs per brand. Sales definitions differ per business. Group-level revenue reporting describes process rather than customers.
The consequence is familiar to anyone who has sat in the post-integration board meeting: cross-sell targets that assume a single customer view which does not exist, retention numbers nobody can fully explain, and a CRM migration proposed as the fix for what is actually an ownership problem.
What usually goes wrong
Platform-first thinking. The instinct is to migrate everything onto one system. Migration without governance moves the fragmentation into a single platform and calls it progress.
Identity is assumed, not resolved. Nobody establishes how many actual customers the group has before building plans on the answer.
Contact rules stay local. Consent, suppression and frequency remain per brand. The group communicates with the same person from three directions without knowing it.
Nobody owns the layer. Each brand owns its own CRM activity. The connective layer between them was never anybody's job, because it did not exist when the jobs were defined.
The review
A CONTROL review scoped to the integration: two to three weeks, read-only, no disruption to trading.
It establishes the true state of the combined customer estate: identity overlap between the acquired bases, the differences in consent and contact treatment, where revenue attribution breaks between brands, and who currently decides what across the group.
Output: a consolidation sequence ordered by revenue consequence rather than by system, ownership recommendations, and a clear statement of what must be governed centrally versus what can stay local.
Where the group chooses to act on it, Saiga can design and run the consolidation as a defined engagement, or govern your team's delivery of it. Neither is assumed.
What you receive
A written assessment covering:
How many customers the group actually has: identity overlap between acquired bases, quantified
How consent, suppression and contact treatment differ by brand, and where that exposes the group
Where revenue attribution breaks between brands, and what group reporting can and cannot currently claim
Who decides what today: the de facto decision-rights map across the group
A consolidation sequence ordered by revenue consequence, not by system
A clear statement of what must be governed centrally and what can stay local, with ownership recommendations
A structured walkthrough with the sponsor and, where useful, the integration steering group.
Scope
This is not a systems integration project and not a platform migration. It is the operating model work that determines whether either of those succeeds. Vendor selection, if it becomes relevant, is handled independently: Saiga has no implementation practice and no platform to recommend.
Who this is for
Groups one to four acquisitions in, where integration is declared complete on paper and the customer numbers say otherwise. Commissioned by the COO, Integration Director, CMO or the fund-side operating partner.
Why Saiga
Nine years inside CRM and lifecycle functions at Disney+, Barclays, Informa and ICAEW. Enterprise scale, regulated environments, and the platforms this work runs on: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Eloqua, HubSpot, Dynamics 365, Dotdigital.
Saiga is independent of every vendor. There is no implementation to sell you afterwards and no platform to recommend.
After the review
Most groups find the review answers the immediate question and creates a second one: who designs and runs the consolidation. Saiga can deliver that as a defined engagement, or govern your team's delivery of it. Neither is assumed, and neither is priced into the review.
Price
Review from £9,750, fixed, two to three weeks. Consolidation engagements scoped individually, typically from £24,500.
Every month unconsolidated is a month of cross-sell that cannot happen.
FAQs
Is this a migration project?
No. It establishes what should be consolidated and in what order. If a migration turns out to be part of the answer, that is scoped separately, and Saiga has no platform to sell you.
Do you need access to every brand's systems?
Read-only access to the main platforms, plus interviews. Nothing is changed during the review.
We have an integration programme already.
Then this slots into it. The review covers the customer data layer most integration plans assume rather than address.
How soon after a deal is this useful?
Any time after completion. Most groups commission it after the second or third acquisition, when the overlap becomes visible in the numbers.