How will CDP usage patterns and trends evolve in the B2B marketplace as martech and marketing trends shift? Tisson Mathew, Founder & CEO at SkyPoint Cloud has a few predictions to share:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Tisson, tell us more about SkyPoint Cloud and how your journey as founder has been thus far?

I started SkyPoint Cloud based on my own experience building data platforms at my two previous companies. I knew I needed to build a commercially available CDP that addresses the needs of buyers, like me, who experienced many pain points when choosing between current CDPs on the market. In my work with SkyPoint Cloud, I concentrate on my customers’ needs and ensure their desires and values are met on a ground level. As a founder, I have learned that a CDP needs to work with its customers and implement programs to make their businesses better. I wanted to create a product that does just that, and the market is continuing to validate our cause.

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How are you seeing CDP adoption trends being impacted in the B2B marketing / martech industry today? What are some immediate predictions you’d like to share for the near future in terms of CDP adoption trends?

CDPs have been traditional for B2C, and it started from a need to unify customer data and then use that data to ultimately provide better personalization. Alternatively, the CRM industry started in the B2B market. Now, CDPs like SkyPoint Cloud are being built to support both B2B and B2C use cases. B2B companies are seeing the CDP platforms B2C companies use and the value they are getting out of it. These B2B companies want to do better at account-based marketing and are realizing they need a CDP to do that. With companies and customers so out of alignment in their systems, a CDP can help create unification at the account-level and ultimately, achieve better results. I expect to see B2B companies engaging with CDPs to result in better organization and unification that will help them engage and market to their customers – resulting in a decrease in advertising dollar spend and better value in servicing and engaging customers.

How B2B marketers who want to be smarter at how they optimize their martech stack, what are some top thoughts you’d share? In your view, why should CDPs be at the core of a marketing tech stack?

B2B marketers always had account-based marketing as their main way to get the job done. Today, as these marketers continue down this path, the CRMs they use are not scaling with them. B2B marketers need to begin integrating CDPs to drive value and bring data together from all of their organizations in one, central place. From there, marketers can push this data to CRMs and see holistic trends, a customer-360 view that shows them the entire customer journey. A CDP lets marketers know exactly who their customers are, how best to speak and engage with them, and how to experience less of a disconnect – ultimately getting more value for fewer dollars. B2B marketers need to understand that you cannot just market to an entire organization; you need to figure out who the people in the organization really are and what they care about – that is where a CDP becomes most important. 

How do you feel better use of CDPs can impact teams across multiple sectors, a few observations from the recent months?

In recent months, we have worked with a variety of customers in healthcare, hospitality, finance and more, and a common thread we’ve found across sales is the importance of marketing and of understanding your customer. In sales, knowing your customers foundationally is extremely important, and without knowing and using that data, you are simply relying on incomplete information. Additionally, data subject requests can become increasingly expensive, however, a CDP is now helping to cut these costs as data is already organized and requests can be fulfilled much quicker. Across industries and sectors, we continue to see the benefit and impact come back to the value of how a CDP helps you understand your customers.

Another key trend we see in the use of CDPs is privacy. Privacy regulations are playing a huge role in travel, retail, and e-commerce. Without proper privacy measures, customers may not want to purchase from a brand because they do not trust the company to keep their information private and secure. Not only can CDPs help you understand and interact with your customers, but by providing a unified customer profile, CDPs help protect sensitive data and flag fake profiles, adding an additional layer of security to data management.

For marketers who (still) often get confused between the typical CDP-CRM capabilities and differences, how would you help explain it?

While the gap is closing more and more, CRM is understood best as the place where humans enter data, and the CDP is the place where that customer data and machine learning data get connected to develop a full picture of the company. A CDP provides the full picture of the customer journey whereas the CRM is for data entry and cannot digest data. However, I expect to see CDP and CRM capabilities being used more frequently in unison with each other rather than on their own, as they can provide more value to a company when working together.

We’d love to hear more about some of the top martech that you feel will become integral to marketers as customer trends and marketing needs evolve?

There are three trends I predict will become integral to marketers as customer trends and marketing needs evolve:

1. Privacy and trust – These are number one. Customers are consistently finding marketers annoying, do not want to provide their information by phone, they’re unsubscribing from emails and more. Companies need to find a way to engage customers in the way they want to be contacted and provide a level of trust. If marketers do not make customers feel their data is protected, there will be less opportunity to reach customers; customers will delete their data and refuse to share more. As such, we need to rely on marketing techniques that are not solely data-driven but are also driven by customer wants and needs. We will continue to see new developments in the future for data privacy as customers continue to demand increased protection for their personal data.
2. Unifying data silos – Marketers experience a high level of data siloing as data is split up among different CRMs. These companies need clean, quality data that is organized and has insights that can positively affect sales, engagement and more. We will see marketers begin to use CDPs to unify data and create actionable analytics.
3. New marketing techniques – We will see an evolution of marketing techniques as new tools emerge. Email marketing and SMS marketing are becoming less desirable, and consumers are beginning to trust new sources. Marketers need to begin to go to places with better value and not continue to use tools that are declining.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, digital marketing and martech tips and best practices before we wrap up!

While collecting all of this data is important to establishing effective marketing techniques, it is important to ground all of this by remembering that you are dealing with highly sensitive information. While it can be stressful, there are tools there to help you and your company. Stay connected to sales teams, develop agile marketing strategies, and use CDPs and CRMs to your advantage to connect the dots and create successful and beneficial customer relationships.

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