2024 was the year when Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) finally arrived in B2B after providing tremendous value in B2C for several years. Since then, B2B customer data platforms have exploded.
The CDP Institute’s research indicates that 30% of B2B marketers have CDP deployment underway or complete. 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.
By now, you should be familiar with CDP technology. In case you are still unfamiliar, below we will discuss the importance of a B2B customer data platform in 2024. We hope you find it useful.
What Are CDPs & Why Are They Important?
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 competitive marketing 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 backward, analyzing Closed-Won/Closed-Lost. This 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 computing 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.
How CDP Benefits Marketers
The advantages of a well-equipped consumer data platform extend far beyond its capabilities and use cases. Essentially these CDP activities serve as a means to a larger goal: business outcomes.
For example, marketers anticipate that a modern CDP will contribute to benefits such as:
- Higher revenue (58%)
- Improved customer satisfaction (57%)
- Increased customer retention (56%)
- Increased customer acquisition (55%)
Other benefits can be seen with 91% of CDP users believing that their CDP is integral in creating relevant customer experiences through real-time customer data. 79% of Companies Achieve ROI Within Just 12 Months of CDP Adoption. And 91% of Companies with CDP feel the CDP is critical in having the right data available for AI projects.
Working Through CDP Downfalls
Unfortunately, not all CDPs have lived up to the promise; 45% of Forrester respondents reported that their existing CDP underperformed vs business objectives. While security (54%) and technical support (52%) were the primary issues with their current CDPs, marketers were also unsatisfied with:
- Difficulty analyzing data and finding actionable insights (46%)
- Lack of analytics and reporting functionality (45%)
- Inability to show ROI (37%)
With budgets tightening, today’s CFOs check all investments to guarantee they are yielding outcomes for the company. This year, it is vital that any CDP investment generates meaningful ROI for the business so that it does not get cut from the budget.
Gartner predicts that in 2024, CDPs will enter the Trough of Disillusionment stage of the Gartner Hype Cycle, a graphical representation of technology and application maturity and acceptance. In the Trough of Disillusionment phase, interest in the technology dwindles as experiments and implementations fail to deliver on early promises.
A significant obstacle in demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) for a CDP initiative is that certain platforms may take an extensive period, even years, to fully implement, thus postponing actual value. Successful businesses with CDPs speed up their setup and focus on crucial use cases. For instance, media suppression is a sought-after use case when marketing and advertising budgets are being reduced.
What to Think of CDPs in 2024
2024 holds significant opportunities for the CDP market. CDPs, once a specialized emerging technology, are ready to transition into widespread use as a fundamental layer in the martech solution stack.
However, this surge in growth and recognition also raises the stakes for CDPs. It’s crucial for vendors to firmly establish their segment by explicitly outlining their features and applications, or else they risk being overtaken by other technologies that present their offerings more distinctly.
Should the leading CDP vendors capitalize on strategic planning and execution, 2024 could witness CDPs making substantial progress toward being recognized as a mainstream enterprise software category on track with CRMs. Top-tier CDP platforms facilitate cohesive customer experiences, and address data-centric business challenges in marketing and other areas, all while showcasing tangible business value and return on investment.
Looking Ahead
As we navigate evolving B2B customer data platforms in 2024 and beyond, it’s evident that businesses must prioritize adaptable, AI-driven solutions to harness the power of data effectively. With customer expectations at an all-time high and competition fiercer than ever, leveraging advanced analytics, and real-time insights will make all the difference.
By embracing innovative technologies and fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making, companies can not only meet but exceed customer demands, driving sustainable growth.
