How to Lead a Customer Data Platform Project

No organization is perfect. Within every company, there are inefficiencies and opportunities to do things better. Solving some of those issues requires a certain individual within the business to think strategically outside of their own department and be brave enough to bring together the relevant teams, understand how technologies are being used, and find out any hidden processes to solve a cross-department business problem.

The need to invest in a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is no different and requires a leader that has buy-in right from the top, as well as the trust and backing from the business to go and make a transformational change. After all, by investing in a CDP, you will need to leverage financial and operational data just as much as you will for marketing data, which leads to a CDP Champion inside the business who needs to identify and understand the technologies, the data, and the processes that are involved in making those technologies work for the business.

Here's a simple scenario that thew majority of marketers want to be able to implement at scale:

1. Improve the level of personalization in promotional emails and ads;
2. Trigger the same personalized offer and web experience from the email click;
3. Track the website activity and capture details of all products added to a cart from the web visit;
4. In the case that the customer does not convert, use a website nudge to bring them back if they attempt to leave the website;
5. Provide an urgency promo code, in-the-moment, via a popup and countdown timer;
6. Send a cart recovery email;
7. Transfer the abandoned cart into the mobile app experience so the cart rebuilds in the app.

None of this should be difficult in 2024 – today’s marketing technologies can accommodate all of that!

For approximately $20,000, you can get your web personalisation up and running, (integrated to your ESP) and you are potentially covered for the first and second stages. Depending on additional features in your marketing automation tools you may also get to stages 5 and 6 too.

However, it is common for email marketing and ecommerce/website teams to sit in siloed worlds with competing priorities who don't talk to each other. They are wedded to their own tools; perhaps built a custom CMS that struggles to integrate with an ESP.

The result is a human ETL solution to have an actual individual employed to be extracting, cleaning, manipulating, standardizing and joining databases to derive answers that lead to more questions and an eternal loop of manipulating data that is messy and unreliable at source.

This person, or team, could be a Data Scientist or Data Analyst who is likely groaning at the menial list creations that the marketing team wants daily, weekly, monthly (hourly even), or preparing data for dashboards.

Equally, the burden could sit with the IT department to provide data access and exports, write custom scripts to automate some slick efficiencies; but at the end of the day it is all highly inefficient – simply due to the fragmented ways of working in the business. This means that your customer data is unusable, or highly inefficient when attempting to activate the data.

With many departments impacted, the project to solve those inefficiencies with a CDP requires input from many business stakeholders and departments. This is where kick-starting and managing a CDP project starts to appear daunting.

Treating a CDP as a Marketing Transformation

It depends where you look but there are generally 5 critical elements to a marketing transformation:

1. Data
2. Technology
3. People
4. Processes
5. Culture

Each of these 5 elements has the potential to make or break a successful project, and all need to move together at the same pace.

In my experience, People and Culture are the two elements that can mostly impede the success of a CDP or Marketing Transformation project due to competing workloads (i.e. People), and attitudes/expectations (i.e. Culture).

Equally, if there is no champion for customer experience at board level (CMO, CCO, CXO,...), then a project like this will either fail, or has to move very slowly at the same pace as the cultural change will allow. A sales-led company cannot become customer-led overnight – as much as a product-focused business often struggles to change to a sales-led business. All the elements must therefore move in harmony, at the pace of the slowest element for a truly transformational and effective business-changing project (which a CDP is!)

But, there is a solution to those inhibitors! Read on…

Proof of Concepts and/or Multi-year Phased Approach

A full transformation in one big project is not always the best idea. When investing in a CDP, the more data you throw into it, the more it will cost.

CDPs pay huge sums of cash to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other hosting providers to store that data. They can lower costs through economies of scale - but there is a baseline! If you start small, you should also pay a smaller fee and use that smaller unified dataset to solve a specific business problem, and measure the result. From there, you can add use cases as you go that may or may not increase costs, but ultimately paying for what you need now instead of what you might need in the future.

Back to the example earlier, let’s imagine a scenario where unifying ecommerce, email, CRM and web behavioral data replaces an employee’s current role (or department) by removing manual ETL work, or perhaps reduces one business day of work for the IT department on data extracts.

Here, a simple equation to compare the cost of the small implementation with the reduction of people hours is an easy one to do, which is one cost justification.

On top of that is the less tangible benefit of those people and teams being able to focus on other jobs that are actually way more valuable and strategic – remember, they too will have a CDP to work from and devote more time to analyzing data patterns rather than menial data enrichments. That is, unquestionably, time better spent.

Of course, for enabling cross-channel orchestration of the customer experience, a CDP should connect to your marketing channels as well. This is where team siloes need to be replaced with cooperation on some shared, non-competing KPIs.

That cooperative approach can map out a cross-channel customer journey that fully considers the other department's objectives to achieve the common goal. So, if the business is not ready for that at large scale across many teams and departments, that is okay.

But, to justify a CDP or transformation cost to your board, there needs to be a lot of upside in whatever business plan you propose. Thinking in terms of small use cases that a CDP can optimize for, is therefore the way to build out that plan, and map to cost/revenue calculations.

Just presenting that you’ll be ‘improving results by creating a real-time, personalized experience on every channel’ is just aspirational and unquantifiable, and so you need to start with practical use cases in your industry. For example:

• Airlines will likely focus on Passenger Load Factor and ancillary sales as improvements that can be made from a CDP through better recommendations and real-time cross-sell offers.
• Retailers might look at warehouse costs and the lowering of those costs through selling more products via better targeting and upsell.

Practical vs Aspirational Use Cases

It is important to maintain your focus on practical use cases which come down to cost, revenue, time, resource and processes.

By understanding, across each department, where those inefficiencies are, where cost is being accrued and where revenue can clearly be improved, you can almost create a line-item report of the use cases alongside the results, and a time frame to achieve them. This makes it easier to pitch to the budget holders for a smaller budget to solve for the most critical use cases and which impacts smaller (but still vital) parts of the business.

Layering in aspirational hypotheses and use cases with assumed revenue or cost calculations can also be included to show the full potential of ROI, but must be secondary to the practical cases.

If you start small with a Proof of Concept (POC) or phased approach to your CDP deployment, perhaps one brand, one territory, one branch or even one team, then you can more easily present all the components for a compelling business case why a CDP investment is justified.

However, don't ignore the bigger picture entirely! This small implementation you have secured sign-off for could actually still take 12-months to collect the required ROI results from your CDP use cases.

If that timeframe is not going to wash with the immediacy of your board, then a paid-for POC is a fallback option. In this case, there needs to be a good collaboration between the CDP vendor and the enterprise with expectations, milestones and expected results shared upfront.

The POC usually requires commitment to move into a full agreement if the agreed success criteria is met but will ultimately de-risk the CDP investment for your business if it really doesn't go well.

Create an Engaged Partnership with your CDP Vendor

So, this is why the partnership dynamic is important. The vendor needs to know that you have their back, and you need to know they have yours too. And, you are both willing to do what it takes to be successful and embark on a long-standing, profitable and beneficial relationship on both sides.

A CDP is not a product you buy and forget, it is indeed an ongoing practice and transformation, so work with vendors that you trust, and do not make the purchase solely a transactional one.

Avoid ‘The Moon on a Stick’ Promise

It is not always practical for a business to invest in a solution that will deliver the whole scope of use cases you need in one huge implementation – I call this ‘The Moon on a Stick’.

Before CDPs came into existence, if you wanted to unify all the data from customer data-holding systems, then you would undertake a 12-18 month bespoke SQL database build, some custom built connectors and ETL tools to run quite a fragile solution – all of which would be delivered to solve every use case and business requirement you need.

However, the danger was that businesses had already evolved by the time the solution was delivered. This exists today as well with many CDPs looking to deliver on every use case in one monolithic solution. I would not say that they are all negative stories, but we have a much more immediate, agile and accountable tech world today; and a CDP should be implemented in that way too to ensure quicker ‘Time to Value’. 

P.S. From my own experience, having seeing both ways first-hand that the agile, phased approach is 9 times out of 10 the better option than getting delivered the proverbial 'Moon on a Stick'!
 

Final Advice

• Use cases are extremely important in kick-starting your CDP journey, and so my advice is to be militant in sticking to the phased approach and not trying to run too fast. You can have use cases live and running in a couple of months, or even weeks!
  
  
• Start deriving value quickly by getting four or five of your top use cases up and running in the initial phases, and build on those use cases over time to create compounding value.
  
  
• Don’t let other departments and teams, or the board, veer you off course.
  
  
• Prioritizing the most impactful use cases and phases from the start is a prudent choice. 

Finally, be brave, you're on a quest!

The marketer with the bravery to take on the transformation project needs to always think about it like a quest knowing that they will be putting themselves in unfamiliar territories and departments and learning many new things along the way, collecting stories and searching for a prize.

At the end of the project, they may move onto bigger and better things, new roles (and probably a promotion!), or can go back to their home in the shire (marketing team), ready to benefit from clean, trustworthy and actionable customer data, with highly efficient automation and insights.

Do You Dare Take the CDP Quest?

Every quest starts somewhere, but navigating a quest gets much easier with a guide to point you in the right directions. As well as helping to fully utilize our real-time Customer Data Platform, our genuine team of marketing consultants are that guide for our customers, always helping to discover new use cases and ways to extract value from their customer data. So if you're thinking about leading a CDP project, why not start with a demo or a chat?!