In December 2020, we explored the importance of marketers investing in analytics. Today, we’re delving deeper into the concept of a single source of truth (SSoT) and what it entails.
To begin, you must understand that an SSoT is not simply about where data is visualized. Instead, it’s a comprehensive approach to data management and interpretation.
An SSoT is the outcome of a collaborative effort across departments. It involves agreeing on data definitions, establishing a unified data warehouse or lake that coherently integrates data from various applications, and collectively approving the final output.
While implementing an SSoT requires significant effort, its benefits are substantial. With a reliable SSoT, your data definitions and calculations remain consistent regardless of who views the output or where it’s accessed. This allows you to distribute data across various platforms confidently – be it your CRM, MAP, Tableau, Sisense, Power BI, or any other data visualization tool – knowing that everyone is working with the same figures for any given statistic within a specific timeframe.
The value of an SSoT becomes particularly evident when considering scenarios where its absence can lead to confusion and inefficiency. For instance, imagine a board meeting where different departments present conflicting numbers for the same metric, resulting in unproductive debates about accuracy. Such situations underscore why an SSoT is not just beneficial but essential in today’s data-driven business environment.
Why a CRM Can’t Be an SSoT
Your CRM is the main hub for sales activity, and many other departments may endeavor to store information in your CRM so that sales remain informed. But a lot of critical information never (and frankly shouldn’t) goes into your CRM.
LinkedIn advertising data, paid search data, manufacturing data, and accounting information are typically housed in external systems and (except accounting data, hopefully) will only be easy to marry up to CRM data with calculations (name/location matching) or enrichment.
Furthermore, attempting to pipe everything into a CRM taxes custom field limits, data storage limits, and API calls–and unifying the data with standard object records will surpass what should be done with something like Salesforce flows.
Deduplication tools can be bolted onto a CRM (Lean Data, Cloudingo, and others come to mind). Still, when it comes to marrying website activity to CRM standard object records or standardizing job roles from free text title data, you’re unnecessarily taxing your CRM. A data lake or data warehouse is made to combine disparate data sources. Data can be deduplicated, normalized, and unified more reliably within a data warehouse or data lake and then ported back into your other systems.
While flows in Salesforce can achieve many great things (even territory routing if you have zero additional budget), taxing CRM processing limits on something like data normalization or marrying disparate data sources is not advisable. It’s also not practical to store hundreds of thousands of website interaction records in a CRM.
Digital activity provides an essential goldmine of buyer intent data but will quickly blow up a CRM with too many records. Once you get the data into your CRM, you’ll undoubtedly hit a stumbling block when you try to connect the dots between data sources that speak a different “language.”
The Main Ingredient for a Successful SSoT: Collaboration
Developing an SSoT for an organization takes a lot of work before you even decide what kind of data storage and transformation tool you want to move forward with.
At CaliberMind, we’ve helped many organizations set up an SSoT. The organizations that are the most successful do the following:
- Tie the SSoT going live to an OKR
- Designate an executive sponsor
- Designate a stakeholder team
- Develop a list of key milestones to track throughout the buyer journey
- Develop data definitions
- Sign off on all milestones and definitions before building the SSoT.
In our experience, the most painstaking part of standing up an SSoT isn’t putting milestone reporting and data definitions in place. Many times people are unsure of what they want to track and how they want to track it. They also may not realize that they should obtain cross-functional sign-off. If these things aren’t established before kick-off, the project will stall (multiple times) before go-live.
The three things we’ve seen cause executives to openly question data are:
- Variable historical reporting (the numbers change because of retroactively applying filters or a lack of reliable snapshots)
- Lack of agreement on how to define a metric
- Different departments reporting different numbers for the same stat
Collaborating to define what is important to track and how to track it bypasses the issues we’ve outlined above. Check out our B2B Funnel eBook: Align Marketing & Sales Through Demand Gen Funnels.
Choosing an SSoT
Whether you’re evaluating an analytics solution or building your own, there are several factors you must consider when selecting a tool:
- Bi-directional connectivity to integral applications
- Level of internal effort for initial implementation
- Skill-sets needed to build the required data models
- Flexibility and ongoing support LOE
- Skill-sets needed for ongoing support, reporting, and development
- Report visualization requirements
If you’re solving business problems and don’t have the internal bandwidth to take on a project like standing up an SSoT, we recommend you work with an organization that specializes in your specific data problems (if you’re a B2B organization trying to understand your customer journey, that could be us). At any rate, we recommend you read up on the 10 Pillars Every Marketing Analytics Tool Must Have and let us know if you have any questions.
Check back soon for more on best practices for defining key marketing metrics.
