“I say CDP, you say CRM”: Wednesday’s Daily Brief
So long as you have unified customer profiles and can activate them, does it matter what the solution is called?
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Good morning, Marketers, does it matter what it’s called anymore?
I recently had a conversation with a European-based marketer, trying to ask him questions about his CDP. He kept calling it a CRM. Does the difference not matter in some regions? It could hardly be a language problem.
I was reminded of this when I spoke to Andy Pitre at HubSpot about the upgrades to their CRM announced at Inbound this week. Andy agreed that CDPs are addressing much the same challenges that the HubSpot CRM developments are designed to address. HubSpot is not planning to call their system anything other than a CRM, but Pitre admitted that, maybe a year from now, they might change their minds.
I think it’s a case of — if you have a system that keeps customer profiles unified, up-to-date and accessible, and can either activate them or integrate seamlessly with an activation solution, then who cares if it’s called Mickey Mouse for all anyone cares.
Kim Davis
Editorial Director
HubSpot announces enhancements to CRM
Timed to coincide with the opening of this year’s virtual Inbound conference yesterday, HubSpot announced CRM enhancements designed to make their offering more customer-centric, as well as the launch of a new HubSpot Payments solution.
Among the enhancements:
- Operations Hub Enterprise will allow analysts to curate data sets, including pre-selected fields, for downstream users to build reports on, supporting more consistency in reporting;
- A custom behavioral events API will allow Marketing Hub Enterprise users to track key events in both HubSpot and third-party apps;
- Account administrators will have enhanced capabilities to customize their HubSpot CRM instance to reflect the way their business runs, including a business units feature which will allow them to manage multiple brands.
“CRMs have not done a good job of making it easy to get data into the system; they haven’t done a good job of making it easy to validate and deduplicate and enrich the information inside of the system,” said HubSpot VP of Product Andy Pitre. “The opportunity a lot of people are seeing is to build a better customer database.”
Pitre acknowledges that another term for this is enjoying wide currency: CDP. “For me, I’d rather double down on the term CRM.”
Why we care. At a time when many are seeking to deprecate CRM as a burdensome system of record, HubSpot is doubling down on its offering. There was a time when its CRM just seemed to be an add-on to its marketing automation solution (and a free add-on at that). It has become a central element in HubSpot’s offering. We also observe HubSpot’s continued elevation from serving SMBs to challenging those vendors that primarily serve enterprise customers.
Why marketers need to build customer trust
Consumers value their privacy, and so privacy has become a major way for marketers to build value with their customers. It’s all about trust, according to Arshdeep Sood, Marketing Solutions Engineer for consent and preference software OneTrust PreferenceChoice. “Trust is really driving the next decade of growth in differentiators,” said Sood in her talk at our recent MarTech conference.
“Your customers are becoming way more aware about their rights and what they should expect from a brand,” Sood said. “And that is something that is the biggest driver of change and the biggest driver of why you should be thinking about trust.”
To build trust with consumers, marketers have to go beyond just regulations and compliance and actively court the customer’s favor. Make it explicit to customers how you are using their data, and for what improvements to their experience the data contributes. For instance, if you ask for their first name, it’s so that you can personalize communications. If they open an account, that’s because you want to provide tailored product choices to them.
“Knowing that information is going to encourage [the customer] to give you more information,” said Sood, because they know the value they are getting.”
ActionIQ brings its CDP to healthcare
Enterprise CDP ActionIQ announced today that it is available to the healthcare vertical, having completed the compliance audit for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Type 1 standards. Best known for serving large businesses in retail, media and advertising and financial services, it will now support healthcare payers, providers, life sciences and pharmacy brands.
ActionIQ’s healthcare offering will include combining siloed patient data into a single unified profile with its Customer 360 and orchestrating integrated experiences across all touchpoints with Customer Experiences. In addition to the third-party HIPAA Type 1 standards audit, ActionIQ is certified as meeting the voluntary SOC 2 standards for data security.
Why we care. Given the scale of the U.S. healthcare market, with healthcare spending representing 17% of GDP, and the very large audiences healthcare payers and providers address, there appear to be big opportunities here for the right CDP.
With a customer base including brands like Neiman Marcus, Pandora, Michael Kors and Shopify, ActionIQ has a record of managing customer profiles at scale.
Quote of the day
“Good morning to everyone who’s explaining how a Martech tool works in simple language today. I salute you.” Juan Mendoza, Senior Customer Strategist, The Lumery
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