Folding an acquired company’s Marketo, Pardot or HubSpot instance into yours comes down to six decisions, and the ones about people and partitions cost far more to reverse once person records have been merged.
The InHouse Marketers consolidates Adobe Marketo Engage, Account Engagement (Pardot) and HubSpot after an acquisition, and keeps each acquired brand separate inside the destination. Our consultants have done this twice for one web solutions client: several Pardot instances into one Marketo instance in 2020, and later an acquired competitor’s Marketo instance into its parent’s.
Every later build step inherits these, so each is written down with a named owner at the start. The six are written for Adobe Marketo Engage as the destination, as it was on both consolidations below. The method as a whole is in how to merge two Marketo instances after an acquisition.
A central marketing ops team holds the admin role; each acquired brand gets a role scoped to its own workspace. Field creation, the sync user’s credentials and anything touching the CRM sync stay central, handled as requests.
The workspace sets which programs a team sees and the partition sets which people exist for it. A workspace can see more than one partition, so map which sees which before the first import, and how each creation path picks a partition: form fills land in the primary partition of the form’s workspace, list imports in the partition chosen at import, and records from the Salesforce sync by assignment rule.
Each acquired organisation keeps its own sending subdomain, with its own SPF and DKIM, and its own tracking-link and landing page subdomains, set up in Marketo as a branding domain and a landing page domain alias. Reputation is tracked per sending domain, so moving a brand onto the parent’s puts the parent’s deliverability behind the acquired team’s next send.
For a person who exists in both databases, two questions settle it: which legal entity collected the consent, and whether that entity survives the deal. Holding one record per partition until then needs partition-level dedupe, which Marketo Support enables. If the two records are merged later, give the survivor the more restrictive consent state of the two: a Marketo merge keeps whichever value you pick for each field, so nothing does this for you.
Hard bounces, global unsubscribes, complaint flags and manual do-not-contact entries from every instance go into one list in the destination. It applies across every partition from the first send, including partitions whose consent records stay separate.
Whichever instance moves first fixes the connector configuration, sync user, field mapping and routing the others must fit. Choose it on the CRM org each syncs to, contract end dates, live integrations and who can still explain the programs, then cut the connector over one business unit at a time.
Both rows are the same web solutions client, and each links to its write-up. The full list is in the track record.
| Move | Sector | What it involved |
|---|---|---|
| PardottoMarketo | Web solutions | Several separate Pardot instances consolidated into one Marketo instance after a run of acquisitions — workspaces and person partitions per acquired organisation, and a sequencing decision about which instance moved first. Read the write-up |
| MarketotoMarketo | Web solutions | Merging an acquired competitor’s instance into the parent’s, keeping each brand’s database, sending domains and assets separated inside a single licence. Read the write-up |
Most schedule risk in a consolidation waits in other teams’ queues. These four go in before scope is signed off, as set out under sequencing.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC for each acquired brand’s sending subdomain, plus CNAMEs for its tracking-link and landing page subdomains, requested with the exact record values in the ticket. DNS at an acquired company sits with whoever inherited it, and that person is rarely on the project plan.
A dated commitment from the CRM team for the sandbox refresh, which runs to that team’s own release calendar.
For each population to be mailed: lawful basis, point of capture, date, and where the proof sits. The field map is not signed off until this review closes.
We interview the acquired team’s admins at the start, while they are still there to say why each live program was built.
Partition assignment, lifecycle, routing and sync error handling all sit downstream of which Salesforce org survives and which is merged into it. Until that is decided, open the long-lead tickets and the consent review, and hold the build.
Whether a brand is retired is for commercial leadership to decide, because it settles sales territories and whose consent covers which subscribers. Until then, consolidate the platform and the licence, keep each brand in its own workspace and partition, and leave person records unmerged, for the reasons in why one shared workspace is the wrong first move.
Four engagement models: a fixed price for a defined scope, hourly, a monthly retainer or a quarterly retainer. Discovery calls and the initial system audit are free, and the scoped estimate comes out of them. The work is remote, run from Delhi NCR, with calls in your working hours for teams in the US, the UK and Europe.
After an acquisition, start with the audit. Its checklist is published in full, so you can run it on each instance before the first call.
For each instance, list the platform, the CRM org it syncs to and the date its contract renews. The CRM org shapes which instance moves first, and the earliest renewal sets how long you have.
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