6 Questions to Align CDP Use Cases to Your North Star Objectives
Like the celestial North Star orients and guides seasoned navigators and novice sky gazers, a company’s North Star aligns and guides its teams to achieve paramount objectives and outcomes.
Polaris, the North Star, isn’t the brightest star in the sky. When overcast skies mask this celestial compass, how does the explorer navigate the cosmos to find their way?
Similarly, how do teams escape technology evaluations that are mired in capability-centric use cases—features and functions—and shift to evaluations cemented in customer-centric use cases—those aligned to their North Star objectives and outcomes?
Evaluating customer data platforms (CDPs) based on features and functions that aren’t aligned to your company’s North Star objectives and outcomes will result in unclear pathways, and limited success.
Without your bearings, wayfinding can be challenging if not impossible. When evaluating CDPs, your objectives and outcomes are your bearings; so before you embark on your journey by compiling lists of requirements with features and functions, crystallize (1) what it is that you must accomplish (2) and why.
In this blog, we’ll examine six questions to ask yourself and your teams as you navigate evaluating why to invest in a CDP, where to focus that investment, and how to steer evaluations towards supporting your North Star.
6 Questions to Align CDP Use Cases to Your North Star Objectives
- What must we do?
- What are we doing?
- What should we be doing?
- What are we missing?
- What stands in the way?
- How will we execute?
Question 1: What must we do?
Start at the end—your target objectives and outcomes. What are they, and by when do you need to achieve them? What are your revenue growth objectives, and by when do you aim to hit these targets? What are your cost reduction objectives? What is your company doing to improve operations, accelerate go-to-market velocity, and reduce risk? What pressures–internal and external–compel your company to focus on these objectives and outcomes?
Your objectives and outcomes might look something like these:
- Grow repeat purchase rate by 20% in next 18 months
- Reduce customer acquisition costs to under $400
- Grow in-force business to 5MM policyholders by 2027
- Drive $50M in cost savings
- Improve operating margins by 10% by next Fiscal Year
Cross-functional teams and lines of business have distinct team-level metrics and remits, but a company’s North Star guides everyone—practitioners, leaders, and executives—on the optimal path towards achieving strategic-level metrics.
Clarity requires context. With clarity on what you must do, you can assess what you’re capable of doing today and start sketching a path towards your North Star.
Question 2: What are we doing?
Knowing where you need to go is key, but so is knowing where you’re coming from and what it’ll take to navigate towards your objective. When assessing what you are doing now, approach your analysis across three dimensions: people, process, and technology.
Assess your current state holistically and consider the roles that your personnel, internal workflows, and incumbent technologies play in enabling or impeding teams in their pursuits towards achieving your North Star objectives and outcomes.
We advise clients to do the following:
- Assess your current resources and their levels of involvement. Are teams working cross-functionally? Are customer experience-centered metrics and KPIs clearly defined?
- Document perceived risks of maintaining status quo and progress towards achieving business objectives and outcomes
- Scrutinize your channel activation mix, third-party data and identity relationships, and partner/agency ecosystem.
Don’t underestimate the importance of a sound support network; you’ll need executive-level support to drive adoption from the top down. Ask yourself the following questions to pressure-test your company’s operating readiness:
- Who will sponsor this initiative at the executive level in order to ensure alignment to North Star objectives and KPIs?
- Who will champion project prioritization and accelerate optimization efforts to support flexible business definitions, audience segmentation, and campaign delivery?
- Who will be the main point of contact for CDP delivery and ongoing needs?
- Who will train and enable tactical owners to execute specific in-platform tasks?
- Who will support ongoing technical needs?
- Who will provide ongoing systems architecture support to ensure compliance at all times?
Be honest in your self-assessment and thoughtfully document what you’re capable of achieving today and what’s restraining you from achieving more. Use a Customer Experience Maturity Matrix to pinpoint your baselines, identify pathways towards further maturity, and establish a sound understanding of current abilities.
Question 3: What should we be doing?
In many ways, answering this question is straightforward.
If you deploy campaigns too slowly, you know that you should accelerate speed to market. If you target existing customers on paid media for a product they already purchased, you know that you should exclude them from future targeting. If you can’t identify visitors on your site and retarget them, you know that you should adopt technology that unlocks onsite recognition and addressability.
We advise clients to reflect on their current state assessment–what they are doing–in order to properly contextualize what they should be doing.
Don’t confuse desired business outcomes with features and functions; instead, identify resource needs, workflow adaptations and enhancements, and functional requirements that may be required to achieve your objectives and outcomes.
Once you fully understand what you should be doing and what you’re doing today, press on.
Question 4: What are we missing?
In his book, The Psychology of Science, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote, “…it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
Evaluating, let alone adopting CDPs is hard. Reaching your desired state–your North Star–will require new capabilities, processes, and resources. Approaching new solutions to longstanding problems requires critical eyes and open minds. Resist the urge to devise solutions reliant on legacy processes and outdated master-of-none technologies.
Contrast your current state with your desired outcomes–and do this for each input you compile. Here’s an example framework:
Question 5: What stands in the way?
By now, you’re well on your way towards evaluating why to invest in a CDP, where to focus that investment, and how to steer your evaluation towards supporting your North Star.
Still, even the best laid plans go awry. During your evaluation, illuminate potential blockers, obstacles, and risks to help you stay on course without stumbling. Constraints affect people, process, and technology.
Assess who your detractors are, who has competing priorities, and which teams resist change. If you’ve tried and failed to triage similar issues, learn why. Identify what you stand to lose if you don’t change. Project success may hinge on several dependencies, such as:
- Data warehouse migration
- Implementing an adjacent technology
- Hiring or backfilling a key role
Whatever the dependency, you’ll need this information, so you can manage expectations, prioritize use cases, and refine success metrics and near-term outcomes.
Question 6: How will we execute?
You know what to do. You know what you’re capable of. You know what you should do. You even know what’s missing. You know what stands in your way.
You have your bearings.
Here’s one example. To support a business objective of reducing customer acquisition costs to under $400, we need to improve how we suppress customers, and we need access to the right data sooner. To support our business objective of growing our in-force book to 5 million policyholders by 2027, we need to improve how we recognize varying levels of visitor intent on our site and optimize how we retarget them in paid media.
Below, we documented how we will execute.
- Implement 1P-based Tag to identify on-site visitors, collect behavioral and intent signals
- Deploy identify syncs to augment 1P-based identifier with multiple addressable identifiers across various identity spaces
- Pending data migration completion, connect to data warehouse to leverage transaction data for optimal, low-latency dynamic suppressions
- Upskill and empower key stakeholders with hands-on training, self-service guides, and appropriate incentives to achieve outcomes
Buying a CDP? Guide Your Team to Success
Your North Star sets the tone for every team, campaign, message, and KPI. Shifting your CDP evaluation towards customer-centric use cases aligned to your North Star objectives and outcomes will require thoughtful planning and thought-provoking questions.
Approach your CDP evaluation as a seasoned navigator equipped with these questions and help steer your evaluation in the right direction. To learn more about how to build a business case, read our complete guide, How to Build a Business Case for a Composable CDP or reach out if you’re ready to start building.