How to unify customer data with the tools you already have | MarTech

Personalization is no longer optional. Customers expect a seamless, relevant experience at every touchpoint. For most marketers, however, this ambition is met with the harsh reality of limited data.

The marketing team has its own data set, sales has its CRM, and critical product and transaction data is locked away and inaccessible in other systems. This data fragmentation is all too often a major obstacle. A major business event, such as a merger and acquisition or a strategic shift to growth among existing customers, can expose and accelerate the need to unify this data. Without a dedicated Customer Data Platform (CDP) or data warehouse, achieving a single, unified customer view can seem impossibly far away.

That leads to a Catch-22: you can’t prove the impact of marketing without better data, and you can’t get approval for better data without first proving your impact. However, you can get closer to that 360-degree view using the tools you already have, building a business case for future investments by identifying what’s possible today.

For organizations without a comprehensive data platform, there is a practical, resourceful and impactful alternative. It uses technology you already own, especially your CRM and business intelligence (BI) tools, such as Power BI or Tableau.

While this is a short-term solution and not a long-term platform replacement, it is a powerful way to make immediate progress. The strategy is simple:

• Pipe the data: The central idea is to pipe key data sources, such as CRM data and product ownership information, into a BI tool.
• Merging: Within the BI tool, this disparate data can be ‘stitched’ together to create a dynamic and intuitive dashboard. This serves as a visual representation of your combined data rather than a permanent data warehouse.
• Create a marketing sandbox: This dashboard serves as a secure environment where you can break down the entire data set to explore audiences and understand numbers without having to access live source systems or ask for help from the data team.

This contact universe dashboard provides an instant, holistic view of your audience, allowing you to segment and target with a level of accuracy that was previously impossible.

From a uniform image to an enriched audience

This allows you to start identifying critical gaps in your data. For example, the dashboard may show that you only have two contacts on a key target account or that the audience for a new campaign is too small to be viable.

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Integrating a data enrichment tool like ZoomInfo can help bridge these gaps and create a targeted acquisition order. Instead of making broad requests, make very specific requests, such as “Fill the contact gaps at these three specific companies.” This creates a feedback loop where you use your dashboard to identify gaps in coverage, send a targeted briefing to your enrichment tool, and then refresh the dashboard to see a larger, more relevant audience with which to engage.

Build the business case for future investments

While this approach is an effective short-term solution, its main strength lies in its strategic value. To secure investment, marketing teams must provide evidence of marketing’s potential impact. This method allows you to conduct pilots that build a convincing business case.

By mining existing data, you can test a hypothesis in the real world. For example, a team might assume that cross-sell revenue can be increased by 15% by targeting owners of product A with messages about product B. The BI dashboard can be used to build that specific segment, run the campaign, and measure the results. The outcome serves as concrete evidence of what marketing can achieve with a more unified view of data. This provides a way to demonstrate what is possible with low investment and high impact and secure the budget for more robust long-term solutions.

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This hands-on approach to data is also driving a crucial cultural shift. Many marketers are understandably wary or even afraid of data. It can feel like something big, complicated and off-limits. This sandbox unravels data and builds trust.

It helps teams move away from ‘random marketing acts’ and encourages them to think like data scientists: forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, measuring the outcome and repeating it. This is a crucial muscle that marketing teams need to build, especially as AI plays a larger role in analyzing data and automating these experimental loops.

The demand for personalized experiences won’t wait. Examine the tools you have, identify the business outcomes you need to achieve, and start integrating your data. The unique customer view you are waiting for may be closer than you think.