CDP Planning: Eight Tips to Assist Successful Outcomes

CDPs Solve Marketers’ Number One Issue With Existing Technology

According to industry research, the most challenging barrier to marketing technology success is the need to integrate disparate systems. CDPs—and their prebuilt data connectors to hundreds of data systems—solve that need in a unique way. They render a single customer view including all historical interactions, along with predictive analytics and orchestration features to facilitate personalized experiences. If you are new to CDPs, be sure to read our in-depth article, “What is a CDP?,” now!

CDPs Enable Sophisticated, Intelligent Marketing

A CDP functions as the brain of an organization’s marketing technology stack. It starts by collecting customer identity and interaction data from all first- and third-party sources (often through prebuilt, real-time data connectors), and stitches them together into a single, persistent profile for each customer. It then empowers marketers and other business teams with intelligence by providing a user-friendly interface for analyzing customers, segmenting audiences, and predicting next-best actions. Finally, the user interface enables the design and automation of 1:1 campaign journeys across all marketing, CX, and commerce channels, including test design and measurement.

Five Steps To Getting Buy-in For A CDP

1. Prioritize 7-10 specific use cases. Collaborate with stakeholders to identify the specific objectives they want a CDP to help achieve. Prioritize them based on potential business impact.
2. Showcase a CDP’s capabilities. Build familiarity and excitement for the solution by having two or three premier vendors demo their product against key use cases.
3. Estimate ROI. Ask vendors about their typical return on investment for each use case.
4. Create a strong pitch. Build a pitch deck that is financially-focused and conveys how the CDP bridges the gap to achieving stakeholders’ goals.
5. Seek consensus. Present the deck to stakeholders one at a time so you can understand their perspectives, address any concerns, and optimize the pitch deck before presenting to the final decision makers for sign-off.

Three Pitfalls to Avoid During Implementation

1. Not having an in-house project manager. CDPs touch an enormous number of systems, meaning it’s critical to have a resource accountable for wrangling stakeholders and keeping deadlines intact.
2. Starting off with a complex use case. Big projects need momentum in order to keep motivation high. Prioritize your roadmap into a crawl, walk, run framework to convey iteration and emphasize speed to market.
3. Not having a change management plan. Remember that changing employees’ habits takes a careful mixture of empathy, education, and accountability.

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