The Secret to Eliminating Risk from Your CDP Selection
When selecting a CDP, or any central tool in your customer data stack, such as CRM, or marketing automation, the impact of this choice is massive.
This typically represents a major investment of months of effort and sometimes seven-figure multi-year investments.
Getting it right is transformational: automate your work, boost your ROAS across multiple channels, and create a single view of your customers that can drive analytics, content strategy, and even AI.
Getting it wrong, however, can be a disaster. Lost time and effort is just the beginning. When these lynchpin systems don’t hit the mark, you end up with tools that your users don’t adopt, and a weight that drags down every other tool in the stack, due to complex workarounds and manual effort to fill the many gaps.
If you’ve seen a ton of integrations go well and have a broad view of the options and differentiators, you can move fast and make a confident decision. Unfortunately, most marketing and IT teams, at best, have some people on staff who have done major integrations once or twice.
The fastest, safest way to make this critical decision isn’t through comparing features and functions. It’s hands-on experience with multiple projects that have succeeded and that have failed.
Let’s look one of our clients, Pat, and how bringing in McGaw and our CDP selection process let her make a confident decision that was the right fit across the board.
How Do You Know If a CDP Can Really Automate Your Marketing?
Pat, a technology leader at an innovative FinTech company was facing a major problem.
The problem was growth.
Pat’s company was heavily dependent on spinning up marketing services around each new account they signed on.
They had an amazing playbook for this marketing, too, seeing enviable 5x or higher ROAS, and a proven ability to scale and customize this across all their accounts.
But the labor behind this was killing them. Every time they brought in a new account, they had to spin up half a dozen new systems, build out all their ad campaigns and creative, and then support a mishmash of tools throughout the lifetime of their account. The labor this took was significant, so they were constantly spinning up new teams.
Revenue was growing, but costs were pacing it. They couldn’t achieve any economies of scale.
Pat saw a need for centralized orchestration. To establish some best practices in a system that could quickly and easily replicate them to other accounts, and cut down on labor both for onboarding and ongoing management.
After attending webinars and doing a ton of Googling, she came to the conclusion that a CDP (Customer Data Platform) might be the fix she needed.
But she’d never implemented a CDP, and nobody on her team had ever used one.
So as she attended sales demo after sales demo, she only got more confused.
Composable? Integrated? Reverse ETL? AI?
Every vendor said they had the perfect mix, and every one promised they were right for the job.
She only felt more sure that a CDP was the solution she needed, but for lack of experience, she couldn’t tell the difference between promises and reality.
That’s when Pat reached out to McGaw for help. She needed someone who understood all these terms, knew the trade-offs, and could guide the process.
How Do You Pick the Right CDP for Your Business?
We’ve done hundreds of CDP integrations, across multiple platforms, and we brought that expertise into the process.
This immediately gave Pat a shortcut, since we could jump straight into the details and quickly rule out platforms that weren’t the correct fit.
So we knew composability was key, the stack had to grow with Pat’s business and lots of custom developed systems they already had in-house.
And we knew automation and repeatability was very important. The system needed to be easy to scale across lots of accounts and channels with minimal effort.
We also knew that automating processes wasn’t the end-goal. It was the biggest challenge blocking growth, but this CDP had to maintain the company’s proven approach to marketing and communications. We didn’t want to reduce some manual labor, but cut down ROAS at the same time.
So rather than start with a feature matrix, we jumped into end-user use-cases.
- What was the playbook for marketing?
- What channels were they using?
- When they had a new account, what did they set up, and why?
- What was their secret sauce that scaled so well?
We needed to zero in on those best practices that made Pat’s marketing colleagues so successful.
And we also needed to tease out where there were gaps. What were the specific areas where the account teams were putting in too much manual work, making mistakes, and getting frustrated.
Then, with this clarity of business needs, we could move into technology. Again, focusing on understanding what existed today, and then discovering where there were gaps and optimization opportunities.
- How do custom apps and data structures drive the systems?
- Where are Zapier and other middlewares acting as “duct tape” to hold systems together?
- How does data actually flow between the CRM, the analytics platform, and the email tool?
- What specific data transformations are required before that data is usable for automation?
- Where are processes and fragile integrations going to break when they scale up and struggle under more load?
After these two workshops, we were able to use the proven VICE growth hacking framework to help us understand and prioritize what Pat and her internal constituents needed.
Why Adopting a CDP Affects Your Whole Stack
What immediately became clear is that a composable CDP wasn’t going to be the silver bullet Pat had hoped for.
You still need an email platform, you still have your ads to manage in Google and Facebook and LinkedIn, and you still need a data warehouse to drive reports.
A composable CDP is, by definition, a central system that orchestrates and enhances the capabilities of the rest of your marketing tools. It isn’t a replacement for them.
So for Pat, while a CDP could replace a lot of the redundant systems in the mix, it wouldn’t replace everything.
The CDP could be the conductor of the orchestra and be cloned for each new account, but the performers – the email systems, the databases, and the analytics – would also require the ability to be templated and replicated across accounts for this company to achieve its long-term objective of push-button automation.
We looked at alternatives – going from composable CDPs that matched the company’s highly technical culture, to all-in one systems that gave email, SMS, and data integration all under “one roof,” but those were eliminated for being a bit of a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none solution.
They’d require compromises to the company’s marketing playbook, and that was a deal-breaker.
This was a major change in scope for Pat, and one that she knew wasn’t feasible on day one. So this brought up a new requirement: a phased roll-out, that would solve for the highest priority use cases, and put the company on a strong footing to incrementally automate more and more of their processes.
Out of the hundreds of CDPs in the market, this final requirement drilled us down to only a handful of options.
How Do You Turn the Vendor Sales Process to Your Advantage?
Now, with this short list, we were able to quickly focus on this short list of solutions.
We knew we needed a strong management API. If they were going to orchestrate the roll-out of a lot of systems at once, this was going to be a requirement of every single tool in their stack in order to achieve one-click deployment.
With some research into documentation and APIs, we narrowed the CDP list down even further, focusing on Rudderstack, Hightouch, and Segment. All have strong management APIs, both have means to quickly duplicate workflows, and both give flexibility to customize from account to account without requiring a full rebuild.
Now we turned the sales process upside-down.
Rather than reach out to the vendor for a sales pitch and introduction to the systems, we came armed with very specific requirements and nuances between the systems. This let us immediately start working with their solution architects to get to the nuances of each tool.
What were the limitations of the management API?
Where did automated management and replication fit into the product’s roadmap?
And we got demos of the small set of use-cases we weren’t already 100% confident in, based on our prior use of both systems.
From here, we were able to eliminate Rudderstack and come down to two solutions that would do the trick, with Segment and Hightouch.
Segment had one small win over Rudderstack, which was native support for Terraform and infrastructure-as-code (IaC).
IaC lets you manage your whole technical environment using configuration files – like software continuous integration, but for your systems.
And it’s an open standard, adopted by lots of different tools, so it would provide that incremental enhancement of the stack. Provided the systems could be managed as code, or integrated into an IaC workflow via some custom work, Pat would be on solid footing.
What’s the Fastest Way to Achieve Value from your New CDP?
Our final deliverable wasn’t a 100-page report and feature matrix.
Pat got an actionable plan that stack-ranked the top two candidates for their CDP, as well as a set of vendor recommendations to consider across the rest of their stack.
This was a step-by-step manual to get them started with a limited set of use-cases focused on piloting a few new accounts. As they discovered their best practices that could be replicated, they could roll it out across more accounts, and also add in new systems into their IaC automations.
By keeping this roadmap aligned with their use-cases, it also ensured that they weren’t just building tools, they were building value. Maintaining or increasing their ROAS and reducing a ton of manual work by eliminating anti-fragile practices through standardized best practices.
In the end, Pat went with our #2 recommendation. Her reasoning was that after the whole team had a look at the interface and how the systems worked, they liked the user experience.
This is a great consideration, because usability and even just the “vibe” of a system can have a big impact on user adoption.
Pat also saw the need for CDP knowledge within the company, and brought in a new hire to head up the CDP integration and act as the long-term owner of the system. A critical role.
And now Pat’s on her way to achieving the 4x growth, and capturing $10 million of new revenue. And doing so with new levels of efficiency that will multiply profitability ahead of revenue growth.
Why Experience Is the Ultimate Accelerator in Martech Decisions
Pat made the right choice for her in bringing in people with hands-on knowledge of CDPs.
Experience didn’t just speed things up, it re-framed the decision and changed the outcome for the better.
Pat was able to cut out the significant time and expense of a full RFP and feature evaluation. She turned the sales process upside down and bypassed brochures, features, and promises.
She also managed to quickly clear away potentially-dangerous misconceptions about what a CDP was and wasn’t capable of
And she expanded her view to the full business, with use-cases that aligned business value with technical implementation, rather than getting siloed into a purely technical viewpoint.
Finally, thanks to the rigor of the process, she’s now armed with the innovation of Infrastructure as Code to build out a full automated technology organization when she’s ready to take that on.
So the next time you’re making a big stack investment decision, look beyond the brochures and demos. Find experts in your professional network, or reach out to a company like McGaw.
There’s no substitute for experience.
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