B2B Customer Data Platform: Benefits, Features & Best Practices

Digital transformation has revolutionized business-to-business commerce, making it necessary for businesses to acquire and implement advanced digital systems for various functionalities.

B2B customer data platforms are among the best systems with a suite of features that streamline the long and complex B2B selling experience, especially when it comes to how a business engages with its customers.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what a customer data platform is and how the right one can unify your customer data to help you market and sell your products more efficiently.

What Is a B2B Customer Data Platform?

A B2B customer data platform is a software solution that collects, unifies, analyzes, and manages data from various systems to create a single database within a business-to-business customer’s buying journey.

The data can be structured or unstructured, and the centralized software handles and activates all the data points you have on each customer into a unified view.

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Core Features and Capabilities of B2B CDPs

Depending on the customer data platform (CDP) you use for business-to-business (B2B) commerce, you can enjoy features and capabilities such as:

1. Comprehensive Data Foundations

CDPs include data foundations with:

    • Multi-Source Data Collection: You can gather data from various offline and online sources, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, firmographics, and marketing automation platforms (MAPs).
    • Identity Resolution: CDPs link data from different systems and customer touchpoints to firm-based individuals and accounts, creating a consistent, unified profile for each.

2. Insights and Analytics

The right CDP enables advanced audience building and segmentation at both the person and account levels, making initiatives like account-based marketing (ABM) easier.

CDPs can also deliver deep insights after analyzing customer data to identify patterns, behavior, preferences, and needs.

Advanced models even incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning for lead scoring and predictive insights.

3. Activation and Orchestration

You can use your CDP for real-time data activation, which includes pushing the segmented audiences and in-depth data insights into downstream systems in real time.

Downstream tools such as CRMs, email, and advertising use the information to personalize customer engagement across different channels.

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Benefits of a B2B CDP for Businesses

Why does using a good B2B CDP matter?

Here’s why:

    • Centralizing Customer Data: A good CDP combines data from different sources into a single integrated database containing data on every customer interaction and touchpoint. Marketing, sales, customer service, and other departments use the data to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth.
    • Breaking Down Departmental Silos: A CDP can help your organization avoid data silos, which usually happen when you scale too quickly and are unable to share data well. Using a CDP, you get a single point of truth with consolidated data that’s accessible to all departments, making collaboration easier and more efficient.
    • Automated Workflows: CDPs form and become part of a technology stack that adapts to ever-shifting technology trends and customer behavior. You can automate workflows related to collecting, unifying, and utilizing customer data, which reduces the need for your IT team to extensively manage how data flows between different tools.
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How B2B CDPs Work

CDPs for B2B commerce can be a piece of work, but once you implement them the right way, you are good to go.

The working mechanism of a B2B CDP involves four critical aspects:

    1. Ingesting and Connecting Data: A CDP is a central hub that gathers and connects fragmented data across your business. These sources can include CRMs, ERPs, web analytics tools, and more.
    2. Governing and Enriching Data: CDPs validate, clean, and standardize incoming data to ensure it’s accurate and complies with privacy requirements such as GDPR.
    3. Unifying Data: The CDP consolidates all the data you collect into unified, consistent customer profiles at the individual and firm-wide levels.
    4. Activating and Deploying Data: A CDP sends these comprehensive customer profiles down the chain to marketing, sales, and customer service for various functions. For example, you can use them in your MAP to personalize emails or sales software for targeted outreach.
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Strategic Use Cases for B2B Customer Data Platforms

The features and capabilities of customer data platforms for B2B commerce can be customized to fulfill various needs.

Let’s see how and where you can apply them:

    • Account-Based Marketing: When you unify firm-related data with customer behavior insights, you can do targeted campaigns for specific customer accounts for better engagement and to close deals faster.
    • Personalization with a Kick: The unified customer view helps you personalize content and offers. You move away from generic messages that barely move the needle to those tailored to individual and company preferences and needs, which drives higher engagement.
    • Customer Journey Optimization: Because of the detailed view of a customer’s entire journey, you are able to identify and address pain points to improve their experience at every touchpoint.
    • Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service Alignment: A CDP gives you a shared, single source of information that customer service, sales, and marketing teams can use collaboratively. Every team works from the same coherent view, ensuring leads are handed off efficiently, closing rates are increased, and issues are resolved faster.
    • Predictive Analytics: Advanced CDPs can analyze real-time and historical data to forecast customer actions and behavior. Your team can score leads more effectively, identify high-value prospects, and prevent churn in time.
    • Improved Operational Efficiency: Unifying data from multiple sources breaks down data silos and creates a cohesive database for more efficient and effective marketing, sales, and service operations.
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How to Choose the Right B2B CDP

Your business needs are the main determiner of the right B2B customer data platform.

Your decision will depend on crucial considerations such as:

    • Your “must-have” capabilities and features, based on your business goals and needs.
    • Industry-based legal or compliance regulations you must follow, such as HIPAA in healthcare.
    • Your business size and budget, which influence how many users you’ll have and how much you are willing to spend per user per month.
    • Whether the vendor allows you to test the platform before you pay for it.
    • Whether the vendor has certified partners who can help you understand, implement, and integrate the platform with your existing systems.

As Microsoft-certified architects and consultants, we recommend Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as the ideal customer data platform.

Here’s why:

    • The platform is based on Microsoft Azure, which enables it to capitalize on robust analytical features, including Azure-connected Machine Learning and Microsoft AI, to boost engagement.
    • Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unifies and integrates data across multiple sources for a comprehensive customer overview.
    • Sales, marketing, and customer service professionals can collaborate, using data from a single source of truth.
    • The platform unites customer data with real-time journeys, allowing users to understand and create personalized experiences.
    • Businesses get a 360-degree view of each customer, enabling them to deliver the right engagement to each customer with the right message, in the right channel, and at the right time.

As Dynamics 365 consultants, we understand that seeing impact with Dynamics 365 CDP requires balancing technical expertise (in implementation) and organizational psychology (such as in change management and project management).

Can’t wait to implement Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Coffee + Dunn as your preferred Microsoft-certified experts?

Book your free consultation with our team today.

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Common Challenges and How to Solve Them

With adequate planning, it will be easier to implement and integrate your CDP.

Even so, you can expect some challenges. Here are a few common issues you may encounter:

    • Increasingly Complex Customer Journeys: B2B customer journeys are usually long and involve multiple decision-makers. These journeys are difficult to manage and optimize.
    • Poor Data Quality: Inaccurate, duplicate, or incomplete data from different systems can lead to poor decision-making and inefficient processes.
    • Poor Data Management: B2B teams usually lack the specialized data handling and analytics skills needed to use a data platform the right way. Teams may mishandle data, leading to increased privacy concerns and compliance issues.
    • High Implementation Costs: Acquiring, implementing, and maintaining a fulfilling customer data platform for your B2B commerce can be a significant investment. You may not have the right budget for it on an ongoing basis, especially since most vendors charge per user per month.

To resolve these and other problems, you’ll want to employ these good data practices:

    • Prioritize Data Quality and Governance: Instead of manual systems, use automated tools to validate and enrich data. Set clear rules to govern how you collect, sync, process, and use data.
    • Invest in Integration and Automation: Integrate your customer data platform with other B2B tools to automate workflows and data syncing.
    • Promote Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encourage a culture of sharing data between sales, customer service, marketing, and other departments to ensure that everyone works with the same accurate data.
    • Develop Key Skills: Conduct CDP team training to promote data literacy and improve the ability to handle and act on the insights from the platform to streamline customer journeys.

Besides our Dynamics 365 training modules, you can get exclusive access to our Knowledge Hub, check out our webinars, or join our upcoming live demos and events.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Before we wrap up, here are answers to frequent questions about B2B customer data platforms.

How Long Does It Take to Implement a B2B CDP?

The duration for implementing a B2B CDP can be 3-12 months or more.

You can expect the duration to vary depending on the complexity of the software, implementation scope, data quality, integration requirements, and your decision-making speed.

Can B2B CDPs Work with Legacy Systems?

CDPs can and do work with legacy systems through APIs and connectors that ingest data for unification.

These compatible technologies help you migrate data and bridge the gap between new and existing data sources.

As such, you can avoid issues such as fragmented touchpoints and data silos, leading to enhanced B2B customer engagement.

Are B2B CDPs Suitable for SaaS Companies?

B2B CDPs are suitable and increasingly fundamental for SaaS companies since they usually have complicated customer journeys and complex data spread across multiple systems.

SaaS businesses require CDPs to unify data and provide 360-degree customer views from their CRMs, customer support tools, marketing automation platforms, and other software.

Can Marketing Teams Use a B2B CDP Without IT Support?

Some modern self-service B2B CDPs allow marketing teams to use them without extensive IT support.

Initial set-up and data integration may require IT assistance. After that, self-service features such as pre-built connectors, user-friendly interfaces, and unified data views help minimize IT input.

Next Steps

Using the right B2B customer data platform can streamline how you unify customer data, which helps improve personalized targeting for more sales and revenue.

At Coffee + Dunn, we help organizations and businesses implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, our preferred CDP.

Get in touch with our experts now to explore how to optimize your customer engagement strategy with the best CDP.

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