Three functions, three versions of the same customer.
Finance
Accountable to your shareholder for the group’s financial performance and for the figures your statutory auditor signs off, you depend in both cases on the coherence of the customer data. Yet nothing tells you whether two records opened in two systems point to the same account. Nor what becomes of a customer’s history when a new shareholder takes control.
At every close, every board meeting, your credibility rests on a set of figures you consolidate yourself from the sales and billing systems. No one ever wrote data stewardship in your mandate.
Sales
You direct the sales forces of every brand and are accountable for the growth they deliver, even as the tools they work with keep changing. Your salespeople enter the same customer into three CRMs and your figures show three different customers. On every deal, you commit limited resources before you know whether you will win it.
Your systems should highlight the deals that deserve that commitment but they measure different stages from one CRM to the next. Without a consolidated pipeline, you make those calls on the basis of Excel exports. You commit to a forecast built on this manually consolidated data.
Customer
Customer satisfaction is yours to answer for. You run the acquisition and retention programmes that carry the growth of the portfolio. Retaining a customer means knowing which products they own, how they use them, whether they pay and whether they complain. That information lives in separate systems, none of which traces a customer’s journey end to end.
A qualified deal that never closes should teach you what was missing and send the account back into nurturing. None of that happens. When one of your customers raises the alarm before one of your systems does, you are already late.
How many customers do you have?
Three figures, three truths.
You lead the transformation.
Finance, sales and customer relations run into the same obstacle.
Every system carries its own definition of the customer and none produces the complete picture. A CRM and an ERP already make two. Under a buy-and-build strategy, every acquisition arrives with its own systems and processes. Your corporate reporting diverges accordingly.
Identifying and sequencing the transformation projects means weighing what each brings against the time it takes. Orchestrating them means balancing strategic alignment, operational impact and technology choices.
What remains is to assemble the team that will own those projects and deliver on their commitments.
Where to start
Your executive committee wants to launch new offerings this year, integrate an acquisition and deliver the synergies it announced. Your systems and your organisation meet part of that agenda. What they miss becomes the list of projects you could run this year.
The value of an initiative is a function of its return on investment and of the time needed to deliver it.
Clearing an operational bottleneck in 12 weeks comes before a quality-of-life improvement delivered three times faster. The most ambitious transformation projects change the structure of the business. Their compounding efficiency outweighs that of a tactical initiative. Yet those benefits surface only after the build and a period in live operation.
12 weeks
clearing an operational bottleneck
So one way through is tactical initiatives whose successive returns fund the transformation programme and sustain confidence in it.
A deduplicated customer base and product holdings for each account is enough to unlock the initial multi-brand synergies.
Reconciling data from your CRMs and your ERP into a unified customer view gives your teams the same picture of every account. Building this view is a job confined to your data and your systems, whereas rebuilding the CRMs themselves entails a full reorganisation.
For every account, your teams find what it owns, its contracts, its invoices and every piece of customer data your systems hold, in one place.
The billed entity is crucial. When two records look alike, the ERP is the source of truth, because a sales cycle opened on the wrong entity in the CRM puts the billing cycle at risk early in the process, better fix the generating event than handling a lengthy invoice dispute.
40,000 → 10,000
legacy accounts brought down to entities actually billed
At Intescia, in 2025, I consolidated the customer base in 3 weeks from 3 data sources, bringing 40,000 legacy accounts down to 10,000 entities actually billed to align customer data end to end and guarantee contract renewals would be invoiced correctly from day one on go-live. This is how I have started every engagement since.
CRM transformation, a rare skill set.
Architecture · Orchestration · Strategy
A CRM transformation programme draws on skills as far apart as application architecture, tool selection, technical project orchestration, data, change management and the strategic credibility it takes to sell a solution to an executive committee. Finding one person in-house with all those skills can take a long time, holding up your initiative and the benefits that come with it.
I have deep command of CRM, data and lead-to-cash, from solution selection through to go-live. I guarantee the knowledge handover to my successor when the time comes. You end the engagement the day you decide it no longer brings you the value you expected.
My aim is to help you get past an obstacle and set your initiative in motion, for the time it takes to put the permanent operating model in place.
My services
Clarity
Within 4 to 6 weeks, I list the potential strategic projects needed to deliver your CRM transformation. I start with a questionnaire your business functions fill in, then run workshops with dedicated teams to understand the usage and integration of your current CRM, ERP and reporting tools. After a thorough analysis of these inputs, I produce a diagnostic and a recommendation highlighting the priorities and the implementation scenarios worth considering.
Customer Data Hub
Within 3 to 4 months, I consolidate your customer data from every CRM, ERP, website and marketing tool into a unified data platform. I develop your reports on consolidated pipeline, product holdings and churn, so you can steer the group you have built through acquisitions. In a second phase, I integrate this hub with the applications in place, leveraging your customer knowledge across the business.
Flex
As part of your team, I help you take this CRM transformation all the way from the audit to the go-live of your target solution. I lead the programme with you and bring my architect’s eye to the technical choices, steering them towards the options I can commit to, on the systems that run your business, sales, lead-to-cash and reporting.
Give executives clarity on what a CRM transformation programme really involves: a decisive initiative combining processes, systems and data, whose proper alignment takes the business to its next stage of development.
The FOTO method
One Tool One Function
A group that grows by acquisition inherits companies turned into business units, each with its own data, its own systems and its own processes. After analysis and consultation, we decide together, system by system, what is kept, integrated or migrated to a single technology, according to the in-house skills available. One ERP for finance. One CRM for sales and marketing. One shared data repository, a data lake or a light MDM, giving everyone the same view of group performance.
01
Solution selection
SOLUTION SELECTION SUPPORT, BUILT FROM THE STRATEGIC VISION, THE PROCESSES AND THE SYSTEMS IN PLACE
Choosing a tool is the easiest step, the one that gives the illusion the project is done. Most organisations that consult me spend too much time assessing technology and the tools market, too little thinking about their processes and their people, when the real challenge only begins at implementation. My work therefore starts with an audit of the organisation, its systems, its interfaces, in the light of the group’s strategic stage. From it come the available options, documented with their strengths and weaknesses, then a recommendation. The specification that follows goes out to integrators, whose proposals establish the real budget.
02
Programme sequencing
THE PROGRAMME IS BUILT AROUND A TIMELINE OF MEASURABLE BUSINESS OUTCOMES
Success criteria are set at the outset with the executives and their teams, as facts: measurable, beyond argument afterwards. Once the target vision is clear, I list the projects required, their dependencies and their sequence. For mid-sized organisations in buy-and-build, the priority is often to make the synergies envisaged at acquisition real. The first challenge in such a situation is to consolidate customer knowledge within a few weeks, to prepare the CRM rationalisation, then integrate with the ERP into a streamlined lead-to-cash process.
03
Support through to Go-Live
RUNNING THE PROGRAMME ALONGSIDE THE CLIENT, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE INTEGRATOR
I support the stakeholders and the executive throughout the programme, through to delivery in production, accountable for time and budget. Every risk gets its countermeasure, so the project weighs as little as possible on the group’s day-to-day operations. Whenever we drift from plan, the executive committee hears it from me, with the best options already set out. The handover leaves the teams and my successor able to operate on their own after deployment.
TRUSTED BY
PHOENIXBLUE
References
PROGRAMMES DELIVERED INTO PRODUCTION, FOR TRANSFORMATION LEADERSHIP TEAMS
INTESCIA GROUP, a European data intelligence publisher, around €100 M in revenue, 800 staff, fifteen brands from acquisitions, three CRMs, two ERPs. Vision and roadmap established in two months and defended before the shareholding fund. Lead-to-cash pilot on Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced, product and quote configuration, billing integrated with the NetSuite ERP through MuleSoft, delivered into production in nine months. Cutover completed over a single weekend, teams working in the tool on Monday morning, within the committed scope.
ENGIE
CRM audit carried out for the group’s investment division, presented to the executive committee.
Air Liquide Santé
Integration architecture and testing, multi-country rollout, two years.
Pernod Ricard
CRM transformation, alongside PwC.
Book a consultation
I lead one transformation project at a time.
Request a strategic consultation to assess your situation, your priorities and what is at stake for your organisation.
