An operating partner takes over a new portfolio group and finds five CRMs that know nothing about each other.
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One shared HubSpot CRM This is not an isolated case. When companies are brought together through a buy-and-build strategy, the value rarely comes from an acquisition alone. It comes from the companies referring customers to each other: cross-selling and upselling across the acquired brands. Every buy-and-build thesis rests on that.
The challenge is that every acquisition brings its own CRM. The additional cross-sell revenue may be in the investment memo that supports the acquisition thesis, but it is not visible in any system. CRM is therefore much more than a software question. It is the operating layer that supports the entire synergy case. At exit, that layer shows whether the case has delivered.
What does this mean in the day-to-day running of a portfolio group? Three things that quickly add up:
The group cannot see the opportunities across brands, or systematically pursue the additional business it could win. The professionalisation that happens first in accounting and controlling after an acquisition is still missing in sales.
5–10 contracts per company, no cross-selling between brands, marketing spend duplicated 2–4 times, and group reporting rebuilt manually in Excel every month. None of this appears on a single line. Ultimately, this is a valuation issue rather than an accounting issue: during due diligence, a buyer negotiates anything they cannot verify in the system out of the multiple.
When leaders leave, their knowledge usually leaves with them. A new group CRO then spends their first quarter reconstructing the pipeline from five systems instead of executing the value creation plan.
Clear decisions, a defined process and outcomes the team can see.
With only one company in the portfolio, a separate sales structure is a footnote: there is no other team to coordinate with. That changes with the second company. From the day of closing, there are two sales teams, two pricing models and no shared pipeline. The synergy assumed in the investment memo is now an open task.
If the issue is left unresolved, it still surfaces on its own, usually at the worst possible time. It may happen in the next planning round, when order intake cannot be reconciled into one number. Or it happens during vendor due diligence before exit, when the buyer checks every number against the system. At that point, the gap is a fact that cannot be closed retrospectively.
For the operating partner, closing the second acquisition is therefore the point at which an intention becomes an assignment with a deadline. It needs to be repeatable for every subsequent portfolio company, rather than reinvented each time.
How we work together
You cannot report cross-selling retrospectively in a dashboard if it never happened in a shared CRM. That is why the work starts with identifying whose customer data lives where, rather than with the dashboard.
Stack and data audit across all portfolio companies, lifecycle and pipeline design, and the agreed rollout sequence.
Central HubSpot portal configured, business-unit architecture, and Marketing, Sales, Service and Operations Hubs live at the platform company.
Pilot company first, followed by the rest in waterfall batches, roughly one portfolio company every two weeks.
LP reporting pack, group dashboards, quarterly value creation plan review, and documented handover to revenue owners.
Verifiable pipeline, CAC, net retention and cohort data, traceable to the source, months before the sale process.
One contact database across all brands, one marketing engine and one customer view: cross-sell becomes a real pipeline rather than a slide in the deck.
Five CRMs become one, and 20–40 separate tools become five to eight. Across five portfolio companies, typical savings are CHF 200,000–600,000 per year.
Pipeline, CAC, gross retention and net retention are reviewed monthly in a consistent, traceable way. The data room is ready months before the process.
A new group CRO takes over a portal with defined sales stages, separate pipelines per brand, cross-sell attribution and current LP reporting.
Portfolio consolidation calculator
Three portfolio inputs estimate licence consolidation, recovered selling time and the first-year cross-sell opportunity.
Indicative range based on the original portfolio model.
Model assumptions: 3 contracts per company at CHF 40,000 annually, net saving after the central HubSpot bill of 55%; 4% of revenue-team loaded cost recovered at CHF 120,000 per role; first-year cross-sell at 1% of group revenue.
Pressure-test these numbers →Concrete deliverables, not a vague scope of work.
“Sometimes there's three labels supporting one company. Sometimes we don't even know about that. Sometimes the customer doesn't even know about that.”
A buy-and-build group of 10 marketing organisations in DACH and BeNeLux, with around 700 customers. This rollout ran from April to September 2026, with the first three labels live after two quarters.
400+ employees across 8 European locations, EUR 64m group revenue (2024), including Salesforce, an ERP backbone and Pardot.
Prices are shown as fixed-scope guidance. HubSpot licences are purchased directly by the client where relevant.
~CHF 150,000
Month 1–4
Central portal, business units, Marketing/Sales/Service/Operations Hubs and first integration
Book a free callCHF 15,000–50,000 per company
Month 4–18
Lossless export, Mailchimp/Outreach migration, onboarding week and a fixed Friday go-live
Book a free call~CHF 10,000/month
From month 12
Until exit, followed by handover to an internal group RevOps role
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Lifecycle and pipeline design are developed together with local managing directors rather than imposed from above. This significantly reduces local resistance.
No. A lossless export and migration of activities are explicitly included in every source-system migration.
New acquisitions follow the same fixed two-week cadence as the other portfolio companies. No special process is needed.
Typically from week 8, once the platform build is complete on the first company.
This service creates standalone outcomes. Together with the others, it forms the full operating system.
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Testimonials
We did not want to repaint what we already had in a different colour. We deliberately started from scratch.
We save approximately €200,000 every year—not only through fewer, better technologies, but also by eliminating complexity and the staffing cost of one full-time role. We can now also see in real time whether we are on course.
Our starting point was: help us fill the pipeline until our colleagues ask, ‘How are we ever supposed to work through all of this?’ Then came the aha moment. We realized that we needed to solve a completely different problem—one we did not even know we had. I cannot find a better way to put it: it is fantastic. We now have an automated process, clean qualification, and can see the numbers improving.
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