Virtually every marketer or marketing software vendor I interview says they want to establish “a single source of truth” about customers by getting rid of silos and setting up a single company-wide repository.
Everyone, that is, except Brian Kardon, CMO of business communication provider Fuze.
The former CMO of Eloqua and Lattice Engines, Kardon is not exactly a novice in dealing with customer data. (He will be participating in a keynote discussion on the evolution and future of martech at our MarTech Conference in October.)
“Each marketer has one system of record,” he told me, “and that ends up being marketing automation” like Salesforce’s ExactTarget, while salespeople have their own customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
A marketing automation platform, he said, contains “all our campaigns, all your activities, who opened [emails].”
“That’s your main system of record,” he said. You might also have, say, a specialized tool to track webinar activity, and that data ports into the marketing automation platform.
But, I asked, what about a central repository of customer data, like a Customer Data Platform. Some “single source of truth” about the customer, something that almost everyone I interview professes to want.
Nope, he said. “It’s not our taste. I need to have some walls up.”
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