B2B marketers face complex challenges every day. They work with diverse teams that combine sales, operations, marketing ops, customer experience, and customer service. Across the revenue cycle, they struggle with not having enough flexibility in their data sharing to leverage insights in a seamless manner. Every day they are forced to live with a lack of data quality. Meanwhile, they have to contend with data scattered across silos created by a variety of software packages from multiple vendors that don’t communicate.

The good news is that automated customer data platforms (CDPs) can help with all of these issues. Here are 6 reasons B2B marketers need to get savvy about CDPs.

1. Be ready for RevOps

RevOps (or revenue operations) unify and optimize processes while focusing on people and their data. However, in order for RevOps to work for your business, you need to be monitoring the right metrics:

  • Win rates: this shows you the success of your sales team. By analyzing every stage of your sales funnel, you’re able to tell where sales reps are losing most of their opportunities.
  • Customer churn: this shows how much business you’ve lost over a time period. Tracking this daily can help you understand how your business is doing. Tracking churn over the long-term can help keep your business from disaster.
  • Customer acquisition cost: this shows what it cost to acquire a new customer.
  • Customer lifetime value: This metric demonstrates the growth of a company by showing the average amount your customer pays while engaging with your company.
  • Annual recurring revenue: this shows you the predictable part of your revenue stream. These typically include service, subscriptions, and maintenance. Annual recurring revenue provides a normalized value of monthly recurring revenue.
  • Pipeline velocity: this measures the speed that customers move through your funnel. This metric is one of the best ways for B2B marketers to understand their revenue operations health.

2. Perpetual data quality

While your business may not understand the need for perpetual data quality, rest assured your competition does. Without continuous high-quality data, you’re not going to be able to understand and connect with your customers. Having quality data will allow you to market more effectively while encouraging loyalty. However, to consistently have reliable data, an organization must continuously manage their data quality. This will allow you to have data you can trust and make more knowledgeable decisions faster.

Having quality data also means your employees are more productive. This is because they have to spend less time validating and fixing issues with data. In various industries where compliance regulations are potentially problematic (i.e. finance) having good data quality can literally save you millions in fines.

3. Matching contacts & account hierarchy with ID resolution

ID resolution helps you uncover customer insights and identify customers as they move through different touchpoints across your business. Knowing this information can expand growth opportunities, allow marketers and salespeople to see new upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and help your organization meet its sales targets.

For marketers, an automated CDP provides a more personalized customer experience with content that better matches the customer so you can customize their messaging. All of this translates to happier customers that will stay engaged longer because they were provided targeted engagement that matters to them.

4. Automate predictive & prescriptive analytics

Most of us are familiar with predictive analytics which uses statistical models and various forecasting techniques to predict what is likely to happen in the future. Predictive analytics provides insights based on data. In some cases, the algorithms may try to statistically fill in missing gaps and provide best guesses based upon the data that is available. This can be used for forecasting customer behavior and identifying trends and purchasing patterns.

Prescriptive analytics employs simulation algorithms to provide advice based on possible outcomes and help tell people what they should do. Using prescriptive analytics, the algorithms are able to look at a number of possible actions and then guide the person towards a potential solution. The algorithms try to quantify the effect of the decisions before they are made.

By automating predictive and prescriptive analytics, a CDP is able to combine the models and use machine learning to predict what might happen and offer advice on what to do.

5. Have your privacy compliance in order

With Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and California’s Consumer Privacy Act, data privacy, and compliance is a legitimate concern for companies. The days are long gone when companies could assume that they could collect whatever consumer data they wished and use it as they pleased.

With these regulations, consumers now have the right to know what data you have collected about them, how you use that data, and with whom you wish to share that data. The California regulations also allow consumers to control the sale of their data.

Marketers have to use permission-based marketing which can help create trust between companies and consumers. Using an automated CDP helps companies become reliable data stewards, and enable the use of data to improve customer experience to provide a viable exchange between consumer and company.

6. Automate ongoing data enrichment

With concerns about privacy compliance, instead of buying numerous third-party data lists it’s more important than ever to focus on using first-party data enrichment. Data enrichment is the process of refining the data you have, to make it more accurate and relevant.

There are a number of reasons this is beneficial. One of them is that it allows you to identify duplicate entries within your content and then consolidate those records. It will help you improve the accuracy of your algorithms which in turn can help enhance key decision-making in the future. Ongoing data enrichment can also help you improve targeting of your marketing campaigns helping strengthen customer nurturing and engagement with more personalized messaging. In the end, automating your data enrichment with a CDP can lead to more sales and improve return on investment.

Are you savvy?

While life as a B2B marketer has a number of complex challenges, getting savvy about CDPs and understanding how they can resolve multiple issues will help you reap rewards across the enterprise.