8 steps plan for Marketing Ops to launch a successful CDP

Are you ready for a Customer Data Platform?

It’s not easy but when are really impactful things ever cheap or easy… if they were, everyone would do them. In our previous blog post, we talked about the virtues of a Customer Data Platform. I truly believe sooner or later, everyone will need a CDP. That could be a home-grown system or something off the shelf.

One of the first checks you should do is about your organization’s current level of data maturity. Do you have:

• Central data ingestion

• Data standardization and enrichment

• Good understanding and documentation of data fields and usage

• Fairly clean data with ongoing processes to keep it clean

If you answered no to any of these… you may want to focus on the basics of good data practices first because a CDP depends on it.

If you have fairly mature data practices, and you are ready to leverage more from your data and you are looking for:

• Deeper understanding of prospects

• Finer more revealing slices of reports

• Cross-channel personalization

• etc

Is a CDP worth it?

Then you have to ask yourself... Do the benefits bring enough value? Pricing of a CDP is based on the amount of data and functionality and can range from $1,200 to $300k per year.

There is a lot to consider and no one can tell you if it’s worth it for your company and no one knows your company as well as you do and what value to place on the benefits. You’ll have to do that mental math on what sort of lift on effectiveness justifies the cost (budget/effort). Hopefully you see the tremendous value and can dream of all the exciting possibilities.

Building a CDP properly will take a lot of care. As we’ve seen with other systems it can quickly become very messy. Here are the step to planning a successful CDP deployment.

Planning a successful CDP deployment

1. Assemble and align stakeholders

   1. With stakeholders, hammer out what success at the high level looks like... align the strategy, to the goals of the business and customer experience.

   2. Establish cross-functional liaisons that can speak for their teams and help coordinate activities and access

   3. Infrastructure projects have a way of getting deprioritized by the business when other priorities rear their heads. Building support from senior management to ensure the project isn’t paused

2. Taxonomy of data across Enterprise

   1. how many times have you found fields in a CRM that seems very similar to another field or a field that seems to make no sense...

   2. create a taxonomy of data that’s consistent across all tools in the Enterprise, you want obsessively accurate nomenclature... as this makes later steps much easier and starts good data practices

   3. I highly recommend keep a data dictionary (ideally inline with the tables and fields) to describe the field’s data, usage (people/systems), and team custodian, that way if changes are ever needed you have a place to start. Have seen project’s stifles for fear or breaking something but no one knows who to ask.

3. Define your Primary Use Cases

   1. With a high level definition of success from stakeholders create a prioritized list of use cases

   2. Narrow down to the top few applications for more detailed description, this will help you know which features matter the most

   3. This is a good time to break up uses case into phases

4. Technology Selection

   1. How much Customization do you need/want

   2. The reality is no single vendor excels at all use cases, so you want to model your tools and vendor selection against you primary 2-3 use cases so you can see which vendor specializes in what you most need to accomplish or if you need to Custom Develop a solution

   3. On one end of the spectrum you have CDP-lite solutions that offer a lot of ready-made tools out of the box can be up and running in just a few days and on the other end is custom Development (which will need constant support) which is a many month process for Development and bug fixing and ongoing support

5. Data Integration and Aggregation

   1. Data is likely to be messy, and there needs to be a lot of scrubbing and cleaning done to it before integration should start

   2. Make sure you budget the time and resources needed to get your data clean and ready for import

   3. Map Your Data to Specific Fields, it’s easy when field names are obvious and consistent and there are approved values…

   4. Map logic for processing data from various systems

   5. you should also build in intelligence and reporting for non-approved values to detect increases of bad data or new values you should consider approving

6. Collaborate with all parts of the business and sell how it improves the lives in every department

   1. Data comes from across the enterprise so we’ll need help from many teams that know the data well

   2. Developing good cross-team alignment are critical to keeping a CDP implementation on track

   3. There has to be value for them, so they can justify prioritizing the project/resources that means reminding them how it improves their work and visibility

7. Privacy and Security

   1. Work with IT/legal to ensure you are following laws at the minimum... and any internal guidelines your company may have

   2. API calls and integrations of customer data is as always highly confidential… we must take care to ensure you are upholding the expected security and privacy standards

8. Monitor, measure and record value generated

   1. Communicate the importance of measurement to the organization and commit to it being an ongoing process

   2. The use cases at each stage are milestones in delivery of functionality, we also need to show the value realized… this is where you should identify key items to monitor, measure and report of the value generated. Usually boils down to:

      1. effectiveness improved

      2. time/money saved

      3. usage

   3. These can be things like:

      1. Data ingested / sent to other systems (centralized processing)

      2. Records processed and aggregated (or duplicates removed)

      3. new data fields added to contact / company records

      4. Contacts assigned to segments

      5. Contacts served with personalization

      6. Lift in conversion rate (personalization new vs old)

      7. interaction chained across channels

I want to leave you with a thought... The beauty of the CDP is not that it give you new data but rather it makes the data you already have accessible, organized, and coherent.

(Share thoughts and tips in the comments below)