Personalization is not any longer optional. Customers expect a seamless, relevant experience at every touchpoint. For most marketers, nonetheless, this ambition is met with the tough reality of limited data.
The marketing team has its dataset, sales has its CRM and essential product and transactional data are locked away and inaccessible in other systems. Too often, this data fragmentation is a serious roadblock. A big business event, resembling a merger and acquisition or a strategic shift toward growth from existing customers, can expose and speed up the necessity to unify this data. Without a dedicated Customer Data Platform (CDP) or data warehouse, achieving a single, unified customer view can seem impossibly distant.
That leads to a Catch-22: you cannot prove marketing’s impact without higher data, and you cannot get approval for higher data without first proving your impact. However, you can catch up with to that 360-degree view using the tools you already have, constructing a business case for future investment by establishing what’s possible today.
Create a unified view with existing tools
For organizations and not using a comprehensive data platform, a practical, resourceful and impactful alternative exists. It uses technology you already own, specifically your CRM and business intelligence (BI) tools, like Power BI or Tableau.
Although it is a short-term fix and never a long-term platform substitute, it’s a strong way to make immediate progress. The strategy is simple:
- Funnel the data: The central idea is to pipe key data sources, resembling CRM data and product ownership information, right into a BI tool.
- Stitch it together: Within the BI tool, this disparate data may be “stitched” together to create a dynamic and intuitive dashboard. This serves as a visible representation of your combined data relatively than a everlasting data warehouse.
- Create a marketing sandbox: This dashboard serves as a secure environment where you can slice and dice the entire dataset to explore audiences and understand numbers with no need to access live source systems or requesting assistance from the data team.
This contact universe dashboard provides an instantaneous, holistic view of your audience, enabling you to segment and goal with a level of precision that was previously not possible.
From a unified view to an enriched audience
With this, you can begin to discover critical gaps in your data. For example, the dashboard might reveal that you only have two contacts at a key goal account or that the audience for a brand new campaign is just too small to be viable.
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Integrating a data enrichment tool like ZoomInfo can assist bridge these gaps and create a targeted acquisition temporary. Instead of creating broad requests, you could make highly specific ones, resembling “Fill the contact gaps at these three specific firms”. This creates a feedback loop where you use your dashboard to discover coverage gaps, send a targeted temporary to your enrichment tool, after which refresh the dashboard to see a bigger, more relevant audience to engage.
Build the business case for future investment
While this approach is an efficient short-term solution, its primary strength lies in its strategic value. To secure investment, marketing teams must provide evidence of selling’s potential impact. This method allows you to run pilots that construct a compelling business case.
By unlocking existing data, you can test a hypothesis in the actual world. For instance, a team could hypothesize that cross-sell revenue may be increased by 15% by targeting owners of Product A with messaging about Product B. The BI dashboard may be used to construct that precise segment, run the campaign, and measure the outcomes. The consequence serves as concrete evidence of what marketing can achieve with a more unified view of data. This offers a low-investment, high-impact way to exhibit what is feasible and secure the budget for more robust, long-term solutions.
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This hands-on approach to data also fosters a critical cultural shift. Many marketers are understandably wary and even terrified of data. It can feel like a giant, complicated thing that’s off-limits. This sandbox demystifies data and builds confidence.
It helps move teams away from “random acts of selling” and encourages them to think like data scientists: forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, measuring the consequence, and iterating. This is a vital muscle for marketing teams to construct, especially as AI plays a bigger role in analyzing data and automating these experimental loops.
The demand for personalized experiences won’t wait. Examine the tools you have, discover the business outcomes you need to drive, and start integrating your data. The single customer view you’re waiting for could be closer than you think.
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