• News,  Vendor Selection

    Customer Data is Problem #1

    Everybody is making predictions for the next year. Well, I see two certainties in marketing organizations for 2023. 

    1. In response to both the recession and overspending over the last years, most marketing execs. will be culling their martech spend by shrinking user licenses and even cancelling some point solutions altogether.
    2. The one area they will NOT hold back spending is on Customer Data Management.

    Marketing and sales professionals alike are saying inaccurate customer data is the biggest impediment to succeeding with data-driven marketing. According to a recent survey among 600 sales and marketing decision-makers in B2B or B2B-B2C hybrid firms by Dun & Bradstreet, some 34% of respondents cite accuracy of customer data as an obstacle to succeeding with data-driven marketing, and 30% cite the cost of third party data and lack of analytic capabilities as obstacles.

    Which means that my new Vendor Selection Matrixtm research on Customer Data Management (CDM) is going to be more useful than ever for potential buyers of CDM software. Especially as the report reflects the view of the market, 1500 business decision-makers reported their opinions and ratings for the CDM vendors they know. That is quite different than the standard research reports from my old colleagues (remember, I am ex- Gartner and ex-Forrester) that focus on an analyst’s rating of the product. Buyers much prefer to hear what their peers are saying about a solution, I would suggest. 

    Depending on how much you believe the claims, there are over 140 vendors with CDM solutions, often calling their software Customer Data Platforms (CDP). The vendor landscape is actually quite stable with several well-established independent CDP vendors out there. These are now being challenged not only by the expanded sales efforts of enterprise software vendors like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle, but also through increased competition from tools that enable in-house IT teams to build their own CDP equivalent. We estimate that 40-45% of companies have automated, or will be automating, parts of the CDM process in 2022.

    Providing an optimal customer experience is impossible without having a unified Customer Data Management (CDM) process in place: a process that includes the consolidation and aggregation of all data collected in separate systems across the company. This is not an IT-centric data warehouse or data lakes approach, ideally it should be a Marketing-led CDM initiative, helping to ensure the data unification project is focused directly on marketing requirements. 

    These are the 11 vendors that qualified as Market Leader (having both a Strategy and an Execution score of over 4 out of 5) in the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Customer Data Management 2022 due to their scores in the survey and me (listed alphabetically):

    ACTIONIQ, BLUECONIC, CROSSENGAGE, EULERIAN, EVERGAGE, LYTICS, NGDATA, REDPOINT GLOBAL, SALESFORCE, TEALIUM, and TWILIO

    These are the vendor brands named spontaneously by the survey respondents. Some of the brands are part of larger vendor organizations (such as Evergage being part of Salesforce).

    The overall Global Leader, as they were in the 2020 report, was Tealium.  

    The link above connects you to the public version of the report, with the alphabetical list of market leaders and shorter vendor profiles. Watch out for several versions of report in full detail over the next months as several vendors distribute their licensed reprints.

    Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill

  • News,  Vendor Selection

    Customer Data Management Projects Vary by Company Type and Geography

    We are almost there. I’ve done my 2022 Vendor Selection Matrix research on Customer Data Management, the survey has been analyzed, insights and trends have been written up and the vendor scorecards/profiles completed. The report is now with those vendors for fact checking and we expect to publish later in November.  

    Providing an optimal customer experience is impossible without having a unified Customer Data Management (CDM) process in place: a process that includes the consolidation and aggregation of all data collected in separate systems across the company. This is not an IT-centric data warehouse or data lakes approach, ideally it should be a Marketing-led CDM initiative, to ensure the data unification project is focused directly on marketing requirements. 

    The global market for customer data management platform software is rising dramatically as companies invest in their CDM process to ensure success in their digital marketing and digital selling. IDC has sized the CDP software market at $ 2.2 billion in 2021 with an annual growth of 62%. The vendor landscape is quite stable with several well-established independent CDP vendors who are now challenged not only by the expanded sales efforts of enterprise software vendors like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle, but also through increased competition from tools that enable in-house IT teams to build their own CDP equivalent.

    Our survey of 1500 business professionals included this question, “Which of the following processes do you automate, or plan to, with your CDM platform?”. The top six processes named were:     

    • Customer profile resolution
    • Digital experience personalization
    • Business reporting and analytics
    • Mkt. execution testing/optimization
    • Market segmentation
    • Cust. lifetime revenue calculation
    • Channel optimization analysis

    When asked, “Which anticipated top 3 benefits are driving your investment in customer data management automation in 2022?”, well over one third of companies cited content personalization. But that varies across the regions. Real-time personalization and measurement of intent are more important in North America while European respondents are still focused on getting to a single customer database and/or single source of truth, a more basic CDM initiative.

    These are the 15 vendors that qualified for the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Customer Data Management 2022 due to their scores in the survey and me (listed alphabetically):

    ACTIONIQ, BLUECONIC, CALIBER MIND, CROSSENGAGE, EULERIAN, EVERGAGE, LEADSPACE, LYTICS, NGDATA, REDPOINT GLOBAL, SALESFORCE, SITECORE, TEALIUM, TERMINUS, and TWILIO

    Although Evergage was acquired by Salesforce back in 2020, a significant number of respondents named and rated that brand unprompted. Indeed, the list above is a broad mix of vendors with a wide variety of claims: data consolidation, collecting entire clickstreams, creating a “golden record” through identity resolution, enabling intelligent engagement, and identity tagging, even ABM predictive analytics this time. The CDM challenge is different across the B2C and B2B spectrum. It also varies according to whether you are a medium-sized company or a large international enterprise. 

    Watch out for the final version of the report in full detail next month. 

    Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill