How to Choose a B2B Customer Data Platform. Better Data Sources mean Better Decisions.

Leadspace Customer data platform, b2b cdp, marketing technology

As we all know, buying signals come in many shapes and from many sources.  In last week’s blog we discussed how to bring them all together to create buyer profiles at the account, buying center and contact level. Now let’s look at how to practically source all of this data easily while understanding how you can use it in your sales and marketing teams.  

In the olden days of marketing — aka ten years ago — it used to be okay to do an annual data update. It seemed like there weren’t as many acquisitions. People didn’t change jobs as much. And market dynamics just felt a whole lot less fast paced. For the most part we were just beginning to feed dynamic websites. Today’s marketing and sales automation tools, chat bots, etc. need to be fed by the very latest data. Is this person at the same company they were? Does their social profile indicate an interest in our company’s kind of products? Are they a customer? Or not?  

In Forrester’s evaluation of 14 leading B2B CDP companies, Forrester compared the types and sources of data each solution supports. To make their determinations, Forrester considered several factors such as how the CDP incorporates 3rd party data, if (and how) they support consent-only data collection & usage model, whether the solution shows the source of data collected and stored, if the solution offers any proprietary 2nd party data, and if the solution offers native support for account data with a database table, structure, or schema that is account-aware. Let’s look at how Leadspace compares and go through some of the Data Sources & Types that are supported by Leadspace.

We’re proud to say that for supported Data Sources & Types, Forrester differentiated Leadspace’s Buyer Data Platform as a leader among standalone B2B CDPs!

Our B2B Buyer Data platform supports third-party data ingestion through native integrations (example: ZoomInfo) and custom data ingestion via API and SFTP. Included in our core offering is embedded third-party data from our partnerships with ~30 data vendors and our search know-how that allow us to contextualize open and public web/social data. Customer data combined with embedded data and third-party data are utilized to create a client-specific graph. As an open, flexible platform, our graph can easily onboard any new data source. 

It’s important in today’s privacy world to understand what consents are necessary for campaigns, phone calling or texting. Clients can unify and aggregate consent flags across systems within their unified graph and leverage this for segmentation. Leadspace also shares data source fields when performing embedded data enrichment. 

Many CDPs in the B2C space only operate on 1st party data. Leadspace offers both branded and embedded 3rd party data as part of our core platform offering. This is based on data partnerships we have established with ~30 data vendors as well as our platform search capabilities that allow us to contextualize open and public web/social data.

Leadspace Customer data platform, data integration

All customer data combined with the use of our embedded data and/or additional 3rd party data sources combine to create a client-by-client specific buyer graph. Native schema of core objects include: Person, Company, Activity, and the relationships between them. As an open and flexible platform, our graph has been built to easily onboard any new data source.

Finally, we have a standard templatized schema of core B2B objects as well: Person, Company, Activity and the relationships between them. Every data point that is passed is parsed into one of these three objects. 

Data Sources and types are important to consider — especially when thinking about the number of sources that actually complete a record for an account or contact. Thinking through the source by record and any applicable privacy concerns is also very important. To learn more about the benefits of implementing a CDP, and to see how Leadspace compares to other B2B CDPs in all 10 evaluated categories (and is ranked overall in the Forrester Wave), check out The Forrester New Wave™: B2B Standalone CDPs, Q4, 2021

In our next blog, we will be tackling Identity Resolution. Stay tuned!

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