How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the CDP

As 2022 draws to a close, I reflect back on a year spent, mostly in 3 phases, around one new tool type that I've been leading the discovery and RFP for, on behalf of an enterprise company.

1. Discovery: What a CDP (Customer Data Platform) is. What a CDP isn't. Lashings of discovery and workshops to explore if there is a business need to begin with, horizontally, vertically, a mixture of both, back round the houses again to capture all perspectives, gut-feelings. Evidence-based gaps & redundancies mapping.
2. Demonstrating: How a CDP is valuable, use case mapping, business cases, executive summaries, RFP documentation, scoring, demos, scoring, deep-dive sessions, feedback rounds. Translating this into tangible requirements and scope with measurable impact. Documenting, lots. Communicating, lots.
3. 1&2 repeated in different combinations, lots.

So what is a CDP?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is the nexus between a first-party data strategy, the units of your internal customer data sets, warts and all, and the ability to activate that data to deliver results at scale, across an organisation. To make the experience for our customer better, measurably more joined-up.

It is not a data lake. It is not a MDM (Master Data Management). It is not an ad-server. It will not replace your current-thing-that-other-person is worried about. It is not what Gary-from-X-department-used-once-in-a-different-company-and-said-he-could-build-himself. It is downstream gold. It is a product that is often better to buy not build with so many excellent options on the market, depending on your own organisational set up, data maturity and resources.

The software combines data from multiple tools to create a single centralised customer database containing data on all chosen, relevant touch-points and interactions with your product or service. That database can then be segmented in a nearly endless number of ways to create more personalised marketing campaigns.

Which is exciting. If, as any of our data product community will attest - The data is already there, already sane, already unified in some kind of logic, a whole suite of options can be unlocked in one measurable place.

As such, a CDP (Customer Data Platform) is one of the most-invested in tools for marketing technologists and wider product teams across SME, mid-weight & enterprise companies in 2022.

In 2022, the customer data platform (CDP) industry revenue stood at an estimated $2 billion, up 25 percent from a value of $1.6 billion reported a year earlier. (Statista, Sept 2022)

The global Customer Data Platform market size is projected to reach $5.11 billion by 2028, from $1.906 billion in 2021, at a CAGR of 15.0% during 2022-2028. (AbsoluteReports, Feb 2022)

So, why a CDP?

As the proliferation of data continues to explode, more and more is being created and collected for each individual and it is coming from an increasing number of sources.

Integrating this data to provide a unified and easily accessible 360 view of a customer (I know what you're thinking but we can dream) is essential to delivering future growth through richer insights provision, detailed segmentation and targeting, and delivery of more sophisticated marketing activations.

Organisations of any size or scale have complex networks of data silos, data ecosystems, from spreadsheets completed somewhere in an office manually by individuals or at scale via data capture explicitly, compounded by rich behavioural data sets implicitly.

Customer data is often a mess, the struggle is real. On a day-to-day basis managing this is increasingly challenging. Data is hacked together or processed with distributed approaches to de-duplicate, simplify, sync data in workflows even before the customer data reaches the internal team. Unlocking the value and understanding customer data trends, patterns and preferences is moreover hampered by distributed data events and async lifecycle updates.

Wait, what is a CDP, again?

CDP platforms fall roughly into 4 main types.

Each vendor has specialities, strengths and weakness depending on your main use cases.

• Are you looking to focus scope on the management of customer data?
• Or rather as a means to orchestrate personalised experiences based on next-best-action and intelligent profiles?
• Is the main objective to automate and execute campaigns based on this information?
• Finally, perhaps it is to use data pipelines for analytical purposes and modelling?

In short, depending on your main business driver the CDP should focus scope on a combination of the above, with preference broadly on 1 platform use case type at best.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the CDP

Once you have your discovery, workshops, prioritised use cases by type you can better map these need-to-haves vs nice-to-haves to a long-list of vendors based on features & RFP analysis using individual weighted items for scoring.

Get into the details. Functional, Non-Functional & Interfaces requirements should be clearly outlined in an RFP. Each area should be demonstrated with the resulting short-list of vendors. Constantly communicate steps and updates internally and externally. Make everyone sick of you by asking if there's anything else required at this stage, for the next step.

With so many different stakeholders, divisions, data sets and opinions within an organisation it is important to focus the discussion before going to market. It will save you time and energy further into the RFP process.

Questions should focus internal discussion; What is the value of this tool type in your organisation? What is the "main" thing, prioritised and sliced by CDP strengths, weaknesses and types? Is there measurable impact and use cases, slices from proof of concept to delivery? Does this have buy-in? Is this resourced today? How should this be resourced post-procurement? How will we demonstrate promised value? What is the stack affinity with our current platform ecosystem? Who are the primary users? Is there the skill set required? Slice each perspective year 1, year 2,3,4 etc.

There are some truly great vendors out there.

If 2022 taught me one thing, it is that being prepared is just the beginning. Instead of meeting the odd roadblock on the way, anticipate where there will be bumps in the road and structure your plan accordingly.

I hope this goes some way to help data, product or marketing technologists anticipate what might go into an RFP on this tool type. Happy hunting.