2019 was the year when Customer Data Platforms finally arrived in B2B after proving tremendous value in B2C for several years.
The CDP Institute’s latest research indicates that 30% of B2B marketers have CDP deployment underway or complete and another 34% of B2B companies plan to start deploying a customer data platform (CDP) in the next year, compared with just 19% of B2C companies.
B2Bs have significantly longer and more complex sales cycles that create huge volumes of data, and the relationship-driven nature of B2B business requires a persistent and holistic view of the customer across the entire customer journey.
If you are still not yet familiar with CDP technology and wonder why you might need one for your B2B marketing, below is a short description and the entire 2019 in review.
We hope you find it useful.
A CDP brings together customer data from all sources – CRM, Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), email, website, Point of Sale (POS), case studies, partner systems, firmographics, and social networks like LinkedIn – and performs identity resolution at the contact and account level to generate unified profiles for individuals and accounts.
The data combined with AI generates insights – accounts to target, content to share, products to recommend, channels to leverage, and the best time to call, among many other learnings. Insights are activated when they are integrated with business applications and tools such as sales applications, marketing applications, workflows, and analytics.
In today’s fast-paced, competitive environment, a robust CDP is an essential tool for delivering personalized B2B experiences:
- Chain-Based Attribution – Best-in-class marketers are moving away from measuring touches, assigning weights and giving credit to channels. Those events in and of themselves don’t provide end-to-end account journeys. Revenue marketers start with the business outcome in mind and work backwards, analyzing Closed-Won/Closed-Lost. This new attribution model is known as Chain-Based Attribution (CBA) and is only provided by CaliberMind’s CDP.
- Account-Based Marketing – Complete customer profiles and the resulting intelligence lead to better prioritization of high-potential customers and alignment of B2B sales and marketing teams in delivering coordinated and personalized experiences. If you are still scoring individual leads, or compute your account engagement score based on some arbitrary metric (such as minutes – sorry Engagio :)), you are doing it wrong. Smarter Account Based Scoring powered by a CDP delivers results every time.
- Sales Enablement – Organizations that equip their B2B sales team with rich customer data, curated content, and insights from across the customer journey, without salespeople having to search for it, can have more intelligent conversations, deepen relationships, and be more productive.
January 2019: Customer Data Platform Industry Grew 65% in 2018 (CDP Institute Report)
February 2019: Informatica Acquires AllSight, AI-Enabled CDP Startup
March 2019: Salesforce’s Vision for a Customer Data Platform
April 2019: CaliberMind Introduces Chain-Based Attribution Powered by a CDP (Martech Today)
May 2019: B2B Customer Data Platforms Takes Center Stage (B2Bmarketing.net)
June 2019: First Forrester New Wave™ On B2B CDPs Sets The Bar For An Emerging Market (CaliberMind Ranks as a ‘Strong Performer’)
July 2019: Dan & Bradstreet Completes Acquisition Of Lattice Engine
August 2019: Mastercard Acquires SessionM CDP to Broaden its Merchant Loyalty & Marketing Services
September 2019: Teradata Launches Its Own CDP offering
October 2019: Adobe Announces GA of Customer Data Platform (TechCrunch)
November 2019: New Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Adam Blitzer Doubles Down On CDP (Ad Exchanger)
December 2019: The Rise of Customer Data Platforms in B2B (Forbes)
