Forrester Says the Need for More and Better Data Is Driving CDP Adoption

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What’s new in Forrester: New-Tech Customer Data Platforms, Q3 2021

It’s been over two years since Forrester last published the Forrester New Wave™: B2B Customer Data Platforms, and a lot has happened since then. At the end of last month, the newest version of The Forrester New Tech: Customer Data Platforms, Q3 2021 was released.

In the New Tech report, Forrester categorized nearly two dozen emerging B2B customer data platform (CDP) companies into three segments—late, growth, and early stage. Vendor maturity was determined by looking at revenue, funding, and number of employees. Forrester also listed the primary functionality (embedded CDP, standalone CDP, or both), vertical market focus, sample customers, and geographic presence of these vendors. 

A quick look at the vendors by geographic presence suggests that most of the CDP market—probably about 75%—is currently in North America with EMEA making up about 25% and APAC only about 5%. Over the next few years you can expect to see that mix change as more European and Asian B2B enterprises start to adopt and invest in customer data platforms.

Why companies need more and better data—And how can a CDP help you?

The modern B2B marketer’s world is digital-centric and complex. B2B marketers reported the “quality of customer data” as one of the top obstacles to achieving their goals, coming second only to “changing economic conditions” (according to Forrester’s 2021 Global Marketing Survey).

As data lakes flood, using them effectively to extract quality customer data becomes increasingly cumbersome and time-consuming for many companies.

While most companies implement some form of data management platform (DMP), a DMP alone doesn’t deliver a significant competitive advantage. 

By integrating a B2B customer data platform into a DMP, you can yield a much more usable and unified view of profiles for companies, people, and buying teams. This means you can leverage transactional and behavioral 1st party data (from internal sources) enriched with 3rd party data (from external sources) to create a dynamic ideal customer profile (ICP). You can then apply AI and machine learning to activate that ICP across a variety of marketing channels. 

For example, Leadspace customers have been able to achieve the following as a result of tailoring and enriching their data:

  • +78% net new leads sourced 
  • +40% better lead-to-account matching
  •  3x to 5x lift in account engagement
  • +300% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rate

B2B CDP trends on the horizon

With the emergence and implementation of CDPs, Forrester predicts these three trends will come to fruition in the B2B marketplace:

  1. Data unification will emerge as a key benefit of CDPs.
  2. CDPs will flourish among B2B organizations.
  3. Data management experts will utilize CDPs to position their companies for success.

In addition, we expect to see self-service data unification become prominent as companies begin to empower more and more of their employees to become data users with access to CDPs.

Get the B2B Data that matters and create demand that closes

By integrating and unifying first and third-party data to create unified profiles, B2B CDPs empower you to improve the quality of your data and the efficiency of your targeting in order to create demand. 

Unlike most other CDPs that offer proprietary platforms with limited data sources, Leadspace offers a data agnostic platform where we curate +35 B2B data sources and organize 70+ million companies, 240+ million buying centers and 280+ million people in our B2B data graph—so you don’t have to. We make all of this data available in a self-service, cloud based platform so you can tailor your data in order to better engage your customers and prospects. The end result being the creation of more and better demand that actually closes.

Check out Forrester’s New Tech: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q3 2021 to learn more about the values of a B2B CDP and explore your options. Stay tuned for the New Wave later this year, where Forrester will rank top B2B CDP vendors by their capabilities.