Overview
A growing B2B group had acquired several specialist businesses.
Each acquisition brought valuable expertise, customers and services, but also its own terminology, website, propositions, CRM habits and sales material.
We designed a repeatable content and knowledge integration model that could strengthen the group proposition without erasing the specialist value of each business.
Who This Is For
PE-backed businesses pursuing:
- Buy-and-build
- Market consolidation
- International expansion
- Cross-sell
- Centralised marketing
- Shared technology
The Situation
The financial acquisition had completed.
The knowledge acquisition had not.
The group could see cross-sell potential, but customers, sales teams and websites still experienced the businesses separately.
A full rebrand or platform consolidation would take too long and might destroy useful local equity.
Where the Workflow Breaks
Our Approach
Run a commercial knowledge discovery
Map:
- Propositions
- Services
- Customer problems
- Sectors
- Proof
- Terminology
- Buyer roles
- Content assets
- Sales questions
Build a group-level capability model
Identify:
- Genuine overlaps
- Complementary services
- Cross-sell paths
- Conflicting terminology
- Missing proof
Establish minimum operating standards
Define a lightweight common model for:
- Service descriptions
- Proof
- Metadata
- CRM hand-off
- Content ownership
- Measurement
Preserve useful autonomy
Standardise the interfaces, not every local behaviour.
Create an acquisition playbook
Repeat the discovery and integration process for each future acquisition.
Before → After
Where AI Helps
AI can accelerate:
- Content inventory
- Terminology comparison
- Proposition clustering
- Duplicate detection
- Classification
- Knowledge extraction
- Cross-company retrieval
Strategic decisions about positioning, overlap and brand remain human.
What Changes
- Faster commercial understanding after acquisition
- Clearer cross-sell opportunities
- More consistent group proposition
- Less duplicated content
- Reusable integration process
- Better foundations for shared AI and automation
These are the operational changes the work aims for. Any measures are agreed against your own baseline during scoping.
What This Demonstrates
Post-acquisition integration is not only a systems problem.
It is also a knowledge and GTM operating-model problem.
Relevant experience
Named projects that show parts of this approach in practice. They evidence the underlying experience; none of them is the scenario above, and each case study says how it was delivered.
- Marketing Technology Due Diligence & Investment Strategy for a Private Equity Firm
Independent marketing technology due diligence for a growth equity investor evaluating an acquisition.
- Website Content Production for a Leading Nordic Private Equity Firm
A multi-writer rewrite of a private equity firm's website, including its portfolio company profiles.
- Competitive SEO Strategy Across a Multi-Brand Sports Retail Group
Content analysis across a group's portfolio of brands, informing one shared strategy.
- Unified Positioning for a Sustainability Reporting Firm
One positioning across several offers, including a recently combined consultancy.
At a glance
Client type
Capabilities
- GTM integration
- Knowledge architecture
- Proposition
- CRM and content workflow
- Measurement
Most relevant to
PE-backed B2B companiesRelated patterns
Building an AI-Ready Content Operating Model
Mid-market or PE-backed B2B organisation
The organisation wanted more AI. The real blockers were unclear ownership, inconsistent sources and undocumented workflows. We made the process explicit first, then identified where AI could safely remove work or improve decisions.
Creating One Knowledge Layer for Marketing, Sales and AI
Complex B2B organisation
The organisation had plenty of systems but no shared view of which information was authoritative. We created the model connecting content, product knowledge, customer questions and proof without requiring everything to move into one new platform.
Recognise this problem?
We can start by mapping the workflow, finding the bottleneck and defining a contained first improvement.
Discuss a first project