If the Martech space in 2020 could be summed up in two words, it would be COVID-19 and CDP. The former, nobody wants—the latter, everybody wants. But there’s one little problem: you can’t just order a Customer Data Platform. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of tech companies that will sell you a CDP. But there’s a substantial difference between the software and the solution.
The last I heard, there were more than 75 companies selling their versions of a CDP. This ranges from a number of point solutions to platform providers with a very wide range of capabilities marketed across the group. Many of the offerings are not even categorically comparable—creating a very confusing landscape that serves some, but not all, of the big picture.
First of all, a CDP in itself is not an outcome. It is an enabler of an outcome. The outcome itself—for all intents and purposes—is the age-old concept of personalization. Secondly, a CDP will have several underlying parts. These parts are brought together to enable the outcome. They can be from one vendor, or many vendors.
The key construct of a holistic CDP, with a target outcome of real-time, multi-channel personalization, includes:
We’ve been using this approach for years at Publicis Sapient, and when I had a chance to see Salesforce’s perspective on what constitutes a CDP, I was excited to see that we are in very close alignment.
As far as I can tell, most of the CDP marketplace is stuck in block #1 (Data Collection). These are high-performing databases that are meant to collect activities and attributes about customers, and then apply a variety of segmentation rules. But once you purchase this, you still need to deal with data integration, capability activation, presentation, and reporting. What good is having a bunch of data and segments if you can’t do anything with it? Remember, the goal is personalization at scale. And because all of this costs money, it must return value. So measurement needs to be part of the plan.
Now maybe you’re asking—even though I’ve bought (or am about to buy) a CDP, do I actually have a CDP?
I’ll leave the definition up to you. Maybe the better question to ask is: “Are we getting the business outcomes we want out of the technologies we have?” You may have all of the underlying components. For example, you probably have a marketing automation platform, a CRM, a CMS, and other channels to activate on. Maybe you even have a Real-Time Interaction Management/decisioning platform. Not all of them may be the ideal, best-in-class solution. Or, as it is in many cases, perhaps the capabilities that already exist are highly underutilized (due to technical or organizational barriers). But here’s where you need to zoom out and have a plan.
Yes! Salesforce’s official entry to the CDP market through the acquisition of Evergage gives them a market-leading “decisioning” engine along with developing an in-house high-performance database solution that will be the core for data collection needs. They have been laying the framework for a very robust solution for a while now—with a vision that is well aligned to the diagram referenced above. To top it off, their official CDP product (C360 Audiences) is built in the Lightning construct, which will open up the range of capable developers, enable new apps on the Salesforce app store, and be very user-friendly. And—as the solution becomes more tightly integrated with Audience Studio, Salesforce will have a very unique ability to quickly automate actions such as retargeting and suppression.
That said, we are bullish on Salesforce’s roadmap, and we see three approaches to developing a CDP on Salesforce. Here are three lenses through which you can view achieving the target state of building a CDP with varying levels of Salesforce investment:
First, you need to establish the north star. This is a vision for what you want the personalization solution to enable. It should consider the desired business outcomes and measurements, and the use-cases should flow from there. Then you need to take an inventory of what you have to enable the solution. It’ll be a variety of technologies, data, integrations, people, and process. You’ll likely identify capabilities you want to improve, and maybe don’t care to add together. These can all go into the model, and be balanced against the use-cases you need to enable. Then prioritize the use-cases to optimize time-to-value. And you’ll also need to consider what is organizationally achievable. This is undoubtedly a bit of an art or a farm.
By now it probably feels like you’ve picked up Home Depot’s proverbial guide to building a deck in 3 easy steps, only to shake your head and realize it’s a whole lot more complicated than you were hoping. But that’s why you’re a good contractor.
Publicis Sapient has performed this for a number of clients. We have accelerator templates and inherent domain knowledge to help advise, sort through use-cases, and help you find value quickly. Together with Salesforce, we’d be happy to partner with you through this process.
If you would like to continue this discussion, reach out to me at don.dew@publicissapient.com