How to choose the right RevOps platform in a post-merger market

If it feels like every time you open LinkedIn, another sales tech vendor announces a merger, you’re not imagining things. Consolidation is everywhere, especially in the RevOps platform market. When two platforms become one, feature sets and innovation roadmaps change. 

The stakes are high: choose the wrong platform, and your team could be stuck with delays, disappearing features, or a difficult user experience. 

Choose the right one, and you’ve got stability, innovation, and a consistent workflow. In this blog, we’ll walk through five key areas to help you evaluate your RevTech platform. 

1. Vendor stability

Merger periods redirect engineering resources. Engineers get reassigned to focus on consolidating two or more platforms, instead of building new features. 

You can’t control market consolidation, but you can spot the platforms that have things in hand. There are two key indicators to look for:

• 70% of the vendor engineering team is working on innovation, not integration. 
• Roadmaps are pushing new features every six to eight weeks. 

Then, look at support and customer health statistics to build out the picture. Where does customer engagement stand? Are support requests getting addressed on time? Are clients churning?

95% customer satisfaction scores happen when standard support responses are quicker than 60 minutes and P1 incidents are addressed in less than fifteen minutes. 110% net-revenue retention shows existing clients aren’t jumping ship out of frustration.

Before signing on, ask your vendor for clear guarantees:

• Module portability to protect your team's favourite tools and features.
• 12-24 month price-locks to avoid post-merger hikes.   
• Clear exit clauses with reasonable termination rights and data portability.
• TCO models that reveal the full cost of ownership once integration, training, and depreciation expenses are added. 

2. Data integration

When you’re evaluating a platform’s ability to unify fragmented data, prioritize four positive signals: a single source of truth for each customer, smart data enrichment, a clear coexistence plan, and robust data protection and portability.

The best RevOps solutions use one source of truth for each customer. A product demo should be able to show you how a single change to that record propagates everywhere in under five minutes. Then, test two workflows to expose any latency hiding in real-time processing:

1. Email engagement: Signals should flow to your forecast in less than five minutes. 
2. Conversation intelligence: Insights should update deal records in under two minutes.

In Outreach, the Smart Data Enrichment feature lets your admins connect with approved third-party providers like ZoomInfo or SalesIntel and personalize engagement, prioritize outreach, and automate prospect discovery, armed with the latest data. 

Coexistence plans keep legacy tools running while data is enriched in the background. If your team needs to wait six months for full integration, make certain that the features they rely on daily won’t disappear overnight. 

When it comes to contracts, you need data protection and portability guarantees:

• Full-fidelity data export rights with complete schema documentation.
• No “ransom” fees for data extraction at contract termination.
• Clear SLAs for deprovisioning and data purges with a 30-day maximum retention period. 
• Data backfill capabilities and timeline commitments. 

Before signing, press vendors with questions:

• How long does a complete data extract of the largest object take?
• What fees apply if you need weekly off-platform backups?
• Which API limits could throttle high-volume migrations?

3. AI capabilities

AI support keeps your sales team laser-focused, but consolidation periods can put feature performance and development on hold. You need proof that AI capability claims are backed up with actual metrics, not “coming soon”. 

Ask potential vendors for last-quarter benchmarks with deal prediction accuracy (80%+ is ideal) and forecast mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) trends. If they won’t share metrics or model confidence scores, you’re probably just evaluating marketing speak. 

Governance capabilities go hand-in-hand with AI-powered RevOps. Look for: 

• Role-based AI agent activation controls with granular permissions.
• Human-in-the-loop options across all automated decisions. 
• Audit trails for AI-generated insights and recommendations.
• Dataset boundary controls to lock out access to sensitive information. 

Compliance considerations intensify when customer data trains AI models. For Enterprise RevOps, that means understanding where training occurs, how long data is stored, and who has access. Pay attention to:

• Contractual guarantees to make sure customer data stays out of public AI training.
• Tenant isolation for AI processing and model deployment. 
• BYOK/KMS (Bring Your Own Key/Key Management Service) support
• Evaluation methodology for accuracy and false positive rates. 

Ask for accuracy data for AI predictions and clarify what human oversight controls exist for AI-generated deals. Top vendors should be clear on how your conversation data is kept away from competitors. 

Outreach was the first RevOps platform to achieve ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification, the first international standard for Artificial Intelligence Management Systems (AIMS). The framework stipulates precise requirements across AI-related data management, privacy, governance and risk. 

4. Team adoption and migration planning

Platform migration adds to the workload of both the vendor and the user. Your team needs to be equipped to embrace the change fully, and migration planning determines whether your investment pays off. Consider the following:

1. Vendor vs. customer responsibilities 

Ask your vendor for a migration packet that spells out who owns key tasks, like data mapping, cut-over, and hyper-care. You need to understand the expected hours from your admins and the vendor's own full-time headcount committed to your project. 

Ask for examples from similar roll-outs and baseline productivity safeguards. Quota-carrying roles should stay within 80% of normal output during transition. 

2. Change management with measurable outcomes.

After the transition, aim for full team productivity within 30 days. You need a clear training timeline commitment from your vendor. 

3. Platform unity markers

Workflows should be truly unified. Single sign-on, consistent navigation, and one reporting layer are non-negotiable. If the vendor relies on loosely connected modules, you'll still be stitching data together long after go-live. 

4. Best-of-breed tool integration

Some of the tools your team uses may disappear or change post-merger. Demand a clear transition roadmap and temporary connectors until a clear solution is mapped out. Then, ask for references from existing customers. 

5. Enterprise readiness

Enterprise teams need security depth in addition to features. Platform consolidation muddies the water around true capabilities. 

Enterprise-ready RevOps tools should deliver:

• Tenant isolation architecture with demonstrated separation.
• Field-level encryption for sensitive data elements. 
• Penetration testing summaries. 
• Vulnerability management procedures.
• Subprocessory change notification policies 30 days in advance.

At enterprise scale, this means:

• 99.9% uptime commitment with financial credit schedules. 
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) targets.
• Planned maintenance windows documented and limited (4 hours a month max)
• Shared disaster recovery testing frequency and results. 

A competitive proof-of-concept beats demos and promises when evaluating the capabilities of multiple vendors to support you at scale. 

Request a 6-8 week POC plan where you can set specific milestone deliverables. Establish baseline metrics, e.g., current forecast accuracy, response rates, and deal velocity. Then, deploy a control group methodology for measuring improvement. Define clear success criteria, such as forecast MAPE improvement over 15% or time-to-first-meeting reduction over 25%.

Your platform decision in today's market

Platform consolidation makes vendor stability as important as feature sets. When you’re looking for the right RevOps platform, lean towards those offering the data behind the marketing messaging. 

AI-powered capabilities and operational consistency depend on architecture quality, and your team shouldn’t be waiting for deployment. Single customer objects, consistent permissions, and sub-5-minute data are verifiable green flags. 

Once you’ve made a decision, protect your business. Price-locks, portability, and exit clauses cover you when roll-outs stall or critical features go missing. Then ask for proof. The best vendors will welcome evaluation and provide strong customer references. 

Outreach is built with a unified architecture. In a post-merger market, that means we’re focused on innovation, not integration.