When it comes to CMOs, I’m about as data centric as they get. Early in my careerI worked as an economist for a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. I had been happily awash in data and found myself studying such hot topics as the gap in prices of power tools in Japan and the United States.
Years after I became a CMOI thought to myself”Here is where I can use my love of working with lots of information to drive decision making and performance in marketing.” I was in for a rude surprise — the data spigot was badly broken.
The cause of this data logjam quickly became apparent. Most entrepreneurs are dependent on systems which were built to automate individual business functions such as sales, finance, and customer support, to name just a couple. And, despite advances in CRM, e-commerce, BI and marketing applications, not many CMOs can find across these siloed systems to find the insights they should do their job.
It is a frustrating dilemma — entrepreneurs cannot solve this problem because they do not have the inner sales, finance and customer service systems, and do not control the procedures that gather the relevant data. Each of these systems was designed to automate a specific purpose — none have been created with the whole IT landscape in your mind or constructed to inform marketing decisions. In most companies, nobody is charged with pulling all of this info together so the data remains in silos — solving specific operational problems, but not addressing the bigger opportunities within the small business.
I recently spoke to the CMO of an eyewear business in the united kingdom about this very problem. His is a classic illustration — given the company’s siloed systems, he is unable to analyse stock keeping units (SKUs) to recognize these crucial sales patterns as how well various colours and styles of eyeglasses are selling in different areas of the nation. He is not just frustrated, he is angry about being handcuffed because of silo creep along with the influx of unstructured, filthy and largely inaccessible information. If he fails to fix this problem, there is no way he can get what he wants out of his business intelligence initiatives to market effectively.
MDM to the rescue
Master data management (MDM) is the solution. MDM was created to work across all of your business’s systems — to pull together all of your information, clean it and categorise it, providing you with a 360-degree view of your customers and insight into every element of your business.
MDM helps resolve three major problems:
Analytic MDM allows you to analyse and understand your whole customer base in order to segment clients and identify new opportunities and trends.
Customer-360 MDM gathers all of your information about a single customer or product, including transactional information (e.g. site navigation course and past purchases. This permits a sales person or customer support representative to leverage this 360-degree view and better sell or service their customers on a day-to-day basis.
Operational MDM enables all sales and support systems to work together on behalf of their customer. Systems are connected in real time to improve data quality and streamline the customer experience — for example, when a client registers on a web site other relevant systems are automatically upgraded.
MDM’s beneficial impact
From a CMO’s perspective, MDM simplifies a lot of problems and alleviates a lot of frustration.
MDM can help you build Your Company by:
Improving product characterisation in order to monitor and know what lines are selling and why
Uniting customer information so you can understand which customers have bought which specific products and services, and launch successful new offerings
Improving advertising database segmentation so you can better target customers based on function, title, product interest and previous purchases
Eliminating duplicates and reducing marketplace spend
Enhancing ROI tracking accuracy by gaining additional insights into the interaction between marketing spend, touches and sales
Improving the customer experience by linking All Your systems collectively
To help apply the MDM solution, Talend has established a new consulting services bundle, Passport for Master Data Management (MDM) Success. The agency helps establish the base required to guarantee MDM jobs are delivered on time, within budget, and address the needs of a company’s different lines of business — including marketing.
The effectiveness of MDM was brought home to me another customer visit — that one far more upbeat. Based on projections from a recently installed MDM system, this client forecasts an increase in e-commerce earnings of 11% because the system makes it possible for the customer service agents to do a better job of cross-selling. And, because the MDM system provides sales folks on the floor using more insights into customer past purchases, in store sales are expected to jump by 7 percent.
To get a marketing supervisor, a purpose-built MDM solution is the royal road from the information direction morass and also an end to siloed systems. It’s enough to make any CMO grin.
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