How Culligan is using acquisitions to grow

Acquisitions can often be a gamble for companies in a growth mindset. Get them wrong and they become an ill-fitting revenue loser. Get them right, and they can help a business break into new markets or products.

For Culligan International, a global water services provider, the choice to grow through external means has helped it scale, according to the company, from $250 million in revenue to more than $4 billion. In recent years, Culligan International has been on a full-on shopping spree, completing 50 acquisitions annually, which has enabled the company to serve more than 170 million people in more than 90 countries.

Revenue Brew spoke with two executives from the company about how it identifies effective acquisitions, and how it onboards new teams effectively.

Finding the right match: CEO Scott Clawson has captained the ship as Culligan has deployed its acquisition strategy, which seeks to unify a “very fragmented” water services market. To do this, he said he has teams who go into local markets and create relationships with local providers to see if they might be a good fit for an acquisition.

“M&A is a competency you build, so we just built the muscle. We have many people around the globe that focus on this,” he said.

Clawson said that his team has created a “playbook” that allows for seamless post-acquisition integration.

“We want to keep their service experts and sales experts to help us continue to grow that customer base where they’re at,” Clawson said. “It was a purposeful strategy along with organic growth.”

Effective acquisitions have helped Culligan bolster its organic growth strategy as a unified market is more conducive to getting customers to sign on for long-term services. Clawson said this is how his company has been able to create a balanced mix of international and domestic revenue.

Making water simple: Culligan has also built skillful marketing around the unification its acquisitions have allowed. This has helped customers easily educate themselves on what services are offered and how to get what they need.

“To capture interest, drive awareness, and ultimately convert customers well, we invest in better data, segmentation, and customer insights. In turn, we create globally consistent and locally relevant messaging about water services and water quality,” Global CMO Patricia Pieretti told Revenue Brew via email.

Pieretti’s team engages with sales teams early in planning to align with marketing campaign approaches. These campaigns often incorporate localized sales materials that showcase clear value propositions and embody customer insights. Through shared data, common understandings are created around what’s driving demand, where leads are converting, and what needs to be adjusted.

“We look at customer conversion as a joint responsibility across marketing and sales locally as this often creates the most optimal customer experiences,” Pieretti wrote. “While marketing creates awareness about Culligan as a service leader, it can also drive growth and optimizations as partners to our sales teams.”