Demystifying B2B Customer Data Platforms

Without a doubt, the Customer Data Platform (CDP) market is real and here to stay. As is often the case, however, along with the buzz comes the potential for confusion. Let’s unpack what exactly a CDP can do for B2B marketers and how to cut through the hype when evaluating CDP vendors.

What Can a B2B Customer Data Platform Do for You?

The promise of a CDP is simple yet enormous. It is the single source of marketing truth — allowing you to simplify your data, centralize your segmentation and audience creation, and deliver successful 1:1 omnichannel campaigns.

There are three steps to how a CDP enables you to do this:

1. Ingesting all customer and prospect data from all your marketing and sales systems (marketing automation, CRM, web analytics), enterprise systems (ERP, transaction, product usage, support calls, etc.), and third party sources (such as Dun & Bradstreet) 
2. Unifying the data and creating campaign audiences using this data
3. Activating those audiences in 1:1 campaigns across all your channels

In a world where B2B brands are looking to engage customers in a more meaningful way across the entire buying journey, this value proposition could not be more tantalizing. Companies like Google, Informatica, Tibco, US Foods, and the like have used a CDP to achieve 65% higher engagement, 3x greater pipeline and 3%-5% greater sales quota attainment.

What to Look for in a B2B Customer Data Platform?

Not all CDPs are created equal. The CDP Institute recently released the RealCDP certification, which serves as a “Good Housekeeping Seal” for CDP vendors. It does a good job of listing the evaluation criteria for CDP vendors.

1. Ingest data from any source — this is self-explanatory
2. Capture full detail of ingested data — capture all the raw data (e.g. each website visit, click stream, etc.)
3. Store data indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints) — this is self-explanatory
4. Create unified profiles of identified individuals — identify and match data for each individual across all your source systems to create a “360-degree” view
5. Share data with any system that needs it — share the raw data sets based on segmentation criteria with downstream systems

Five Additional Evaluation Criteria for B2B Customer Data Platforms

As it turns out, though, the RealCDP criteria misses out on some key needs for B2B marketing and sales.

1. Mapping leads to buying groups, accounts and account hierarchies. In B2B, you’re selling to individuals in buying centers and accounts (which live in account hierarchies) — so to match up data across your source systems to build the unified profiles, you need to identify not just individuals, but the buying group(s) to which they belong, accounts, and the place within the account hierarchy in which they belong.
2. Deep integration with the sales channel. In B2B, the sales channel is critical. For marketing to be successful, sales needs to adopt the leads and recommendations sent over from marketing. As such, the integration with sales tools must have capabilities designed to drive sales adoption (rather than just “sharing data”).
3. Open and flexible AI. Marketers crave agility, and AI provides the sifting and automation needed to identify key insights you need for creating the right segments and prioritizing audiences. You need the ability to create models for different types of predictions (e.g. likelihood to convert a net-new customer, expected spend, likelihood to buy more, likelihood to churn, etc.). Many times, companies will have data science teams that create these models so you need to ensure the CDP can import and leverage those models.
4. Third-party data integration. Marketers use many third-party data sources for segmentation and targeting — for example, firmographics, tech install data, public intent and keyword search data, and market share data. Often, this data comes pre-integrated with the CDP so as to reduce the overhead needed to manage multiple third-party data contracts. But the CDP must be able to easily ingest any non-first-party source and incorporate that data into the unified profiles.
5. Platform independence. Given that 82% of B2B marketers use a best-of-breed strategy when it comes to the martech stack, it’s critical that vendors are not tied to a specific platform or marketing/sales cloud.

The CDP market is real and here to stay, and the benefits for B2B marketers are substantial. While the RealCDP designation is extremely helpful, there are some additional criteria that B2B marketers should look at when evaluating CDP vendors. Dun & Bradstreet is continuing to work with independent experts like the CDP Institute to ensure that the certification captures all the relevant criteria so that it is a reliable way for marketers to separate the CDP wheat from the CDP chaff.