Council Post: Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) And Their Role In B2B

Jon Miller is the Chief Product Officer of Demandbase. 

Customer data platforms (CDPs) have become one of the trendiest terms in business recently, but there are still many misconceptions and unknowns about them. What is known, however, is that they’re becoming incredibly important. In fact, research from the CDP Institute shows that 34% of business-to-business (B2B) companies (and 19% of business-to-consumer, or B2C, companies) planned to deploy a CDP in the 12 months following the 2019 survey.

There are CDPs for general business objectives, and CDPs can also be a tool used in part of a larger business solution, such as how my company uses it in our B2B account-based marketing solution.

If you’re in the B2B world and considering deploying a CDP, you might have more questions than answers. To help you out, here’s an overview of what this type of platform does, how it looks in the context of B2B businesses and what else you should know.

Who: CDP Management

Central databases for customer information aren’t a new idea, having been largely characterized as IT projects until recently. But CDPs are not the same. Instead, a CDP is owned and primarily managed by a company’s marketing team, rather than its IT team.

So this begs the question: Who should manage the CDP? Marketing? IT? Sales? If you have a revenue operations department, like many companies are starting to, this is the best choice for CDP management. If you don’t, though, your marketing operations department would be the next logical choice for this. A CDP’s purpose is to serve the needs and goals of marketing and sales, so it makes the most sense to have marketing and revenue teams drive its use.

What: CDP Functionality And Benefits

A CDP is special because it creates a unified view of your customers and prospects, generates segments and insights, then makes those available to other users and systems. It starts with integration, bringing together all the information that exists about individuals and accounts. It connects to first-party data — in B2B, this means sources like your customer relationship management (CRM) software, marketing automation, email service providers and so forth (whereas B2C CDPs will connect to transactional data sources like e-commerce systems). It also integrates third-party data. This typically includes web visits, ad impressions, firmographic and demographic data, etc. All of this gives a singular view of the account and the associated people tied to it. 

After the integration is complete, identity matching occurs. In B2C systems, this happens at the individual level (e.g., “Jon Miller” is tied to “j———-@gmail.com” and a Facebook profile under the same name). But in B2B, this is more complex. The CDP has to unify data around an account, essentially matching leads to accounts. This can be more difficult because you may have a customer with a global company email address, but you have no idea which division they’re in, where they’re located, etc. CDPs are crucial in sifting through the information and connecting the dots that otherwise may remain disconnected.

Beyond this, CDPs are known for their strong segmentation and analytics. You can view traditional reporting analytics (e.g., which territories have the most accounts in your ideal customer profiles), and you can use machine learning as well. Analytics, driven by machine learning, can help you identify which accounts are most likely to be churn risks, which are most likely to be in a buying cycle, etc. This type of information is gold to your sales team, which brings me to my next point.

Why: CDPs And Orchestration

Of course, all marketers know that information alone won’t get you anywhere. You have to be able to turn your analytics and insight into something actionable in order for it to be valuable. CDPs allow you to tap into segmentation and audience management. In B2B, this could be lists of people or accounts. You can create segments of high-fit accounts in your ideal customer profiles that are showing intent to buy your product but haven’t yet engaged with your marketing or sales team. Such an audience would be deserving of your time and attention.

Similarly, let’s say you have a segment of accounts that have had open opportunities in the past but are now closed, and they’re showing signs of waking back up (for example, they’ve engaged with your website or marketing materials, or shown intent on third-party sites). Having the ability to create audiences you can slice and dice is immensely important. Use the data your CDP reveals to make sure all your other sales and marketing touch points are working in harmony.

When: CDPs And Future-Proofing 

All of this explains why CDPs are buzzworthy right now, and why companies are eager to deploy them. But, there’s one point I have yet to mention: the future of marketing technology. It’s clear the marketing stack of yesterday isn’t the marketing stack of tomorrow. If you envision the prior stacks, you’d see multiple systems with lines drawn between them, signifying how they attempt to talk to each other.

The marketing stack of the future is different. It’s more of a hub-and-spoke model, with the CDP at the center. And better yet, it looks like an embedded CDP will be at the center. This is a CDP that is part of a different business solution you need (such as account-based marketing), meaning you get the business solution you wanted with the CDP along with it. At one time, you’re setting up your architecture to be aligned with marketing stacks of tomorrow.

There’s no doubt CDPs (including embedded CDPs) are important, even essential. Especially in the B2B world, it’s time to aggregate your data from all sources, create a unified view of your accounts and make the most of those insights.

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