Marketing Land reports that, with organizations harvesting more and more data from marketing channels, it's little wonder managers of martech stacks are weighing up the benefits and drawbacks of customer data platforms.
This article basically says you should consider a few things before buying CDP software. Craig Howard is VP of technology and chief solution architect at Merkle:
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"What you need to get out of a platform is oftentimes a differentiator for organizations when they're trying to make a choice. Some platforms will kind of expect you to bring nice clean data to them. Other platforms will give you a lot of really powerful tooling to help you with the data quality problem within the platform."
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You need to have an accurate sense of your existing architecture, team, and resources and team. David Raab is CEO of the CDP Institute:
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"And if you don't give them enough features, they will be equally unhappy."
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Once you know where you're at, start making your vendor list. To make that effective, Howard says you should think beyond capabilities and look for info on solutions:
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"Look at what they're solving for within those case studies. Understand their legacy. Understand the industries they have history with to really get a sense of what has a similar approach to solving the problems that I'm looking to solve myself."
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With your vendor list compiled, you can move into the demo process. Howard says there are a few more things to think about
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"Giving more than one demo is really important. The first round ends up being more of an education process, I'd say, where you're understanding the variety that's out there as you talk to different vendors and then you get a sense of what's maybe the best flavor for your organization. And then you have a little better idea of what to look for in subsequent demos, and you have more ability to ask difficult questions and probe into certain capabilities that are really important to you."
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Raab adds that it's also vital you ensure the demo caters to your specific use cases:
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"It doesn't matter if you have like a really slick digitalization for data. If my real problem is identity matching then I'm going to see your identity matching feature. It's really important that you as the buyer take control of that, because your time is limited. Make sure that you are seeing the thing you need to see and not just the things they want to show you."
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