Dun & Bradstreet have partnered with B2B Marketing to produce a white paper on Customer Data Platforms.
The volume of data available to support sales and marketing is growing exponentially. This poses a challenge for marketers who are tasked with finding and storing that data, and making increased commercial use of it. This requires software – not necessarily more software, but integrated software that drives advanced commercial use of the data. This is where CDPs come in.
Unlike the chicken and egg scenario, the data and the software have evolved together – they are interdependent!
Think of your smart phone. Its amazing software helps you make use of all of the data within it. It’s no longer a complicated set of seemingly meaningless data, but is now presented as easily digestible and usable information. The software links the data together, alerting you of time-dependent items. It files, sorts and classifies data so that you can utilise criteria in an instant – and it synchronises with your other devices. In tandem, the software has evolved because the volume of data and our changing lifestyles have demanded it.
It’s the same in the business world. The volume of data is growing equally fast and is equally time-dependent. Yet, according to the recent Dun & Bradstreet B2B Marketing Data report, nearly 50% of organisations we spoke to are not confident of the quality of their data. How much of the data accessible to your organisation do you really use?
Similar to the adoption of electric vehicles, the foundation has been laid for the wider adoption of CDPs, and the next few years will be about the effective utilisation of data in the digital and online world. Very soon, companies will be tailing behind if they are not identifying the majority of online visitors, and serving up personalised, individual content and an integrated and tailored account-based marketing (ABM) approach to drive relevant enquiries.
Sales teams will need access to effective information tools such as CDPs to support ABM at scale to effectively interact with better informed prospects. CDPs can provide realtime data on prospects to avoid frustrating the buyer with questions that a good salesperson should already know the answer to. Data will be key to fine tuning the sales approach by ensuring an in-depth understanding of the client needs and articulating how the differentiated offerings can meet a specific use case.
A CDP such as D&B Lattice enables data from disparate sources such as CRM, web analytics, enterprise resource planning (ERP), etc to be connected together and presents this as a single 360° unified view of each customer.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can then be used to drive the best segmentation and optimise audience creation. After all, good decisions based on poor data are just poor decisions you don’t know about yet!
Finally, a CDP connects with the channels through which marketers engage with buyers. This means marketers can easily activate the AI analytics through omnichannel ABM, and understand the results.
In summary, like the smart phone, the CDP is the tool that brings all of the data together and enables organisations to more easily make strong commercial use of their data.