[music] [Jerry Stoffl] Good morning. Welcome to the final day of Summit 2024. You made it! You made it! Welcome to Creating Organizational Readiness to Implement a Customer Data Platform. Thank you so much for being here so early in the morning. Nina and I are committed to making this session as entertaining, if not more entertaining, than DJ Diesel last night.

So we're really excited to share our expertise in CDP with you all this morning. Nina and I are Adobe veterans who have worked with a number of clients just like you on their CDP. So that being said, my name is Jerry Stoffl. I am a Principal Experience Consultant with Adobe Professional Services. For the past five years, I've worked with over 20 clients on CDP adoption and implementation strategies. Prior to working for Adobe, I was an Adobe customer just like you all, so I've been in your shoes. I'm joined today by my esteemed co-panelist, Nina Caruso. [Nina Caruso] Hi, everyone. Nina Caruso. Thrilled to be here with Jerry today. Similar to Jerry, I was a consultant for many years. About five years ago, I spent time helping customers to implement data management solutions and learned a lot along the way across different verticals and types of industries and different customer maturities. And for the past five years at Adobe, I've been in product marketing, supporting Real-Time CDP. So, yeah, excited to be here. There is one more introduction we would like to make, and that's you all. Now, we did anticipate to do this via a live polling feature. The live polling feature is not working because technology. So we'll just do it by show of hands. I think we're a close-knit group here this morning. So what best describes your role? We're asking this question so we get to know the audience a little better and tailor our content for you all. Show of hands, any marketers in the room? Ok, a good number of marketers. Any sort of tech folks? Ok, a good number of tech, also. What about data or privacy? Ok, a few. Something else, just miscellaneous. Ok. We have a few of you guys, too. We do have content for all of the groups, so you'll walk away with at least some insight here today. And one more question. Again, we were testing this. It didn't exactly work out as we had planned, but where are you at in your CDP journey? If you have a CDP and you're already activated and it's going really well, raise your hand. Ok. One. Ok. Have you implemented, for those of you that have implemented CDP, but maybe just getting started. Ok, a few. What about those who just purchased one? It's brand new. Ok. A lot. A lot. Ok, cool. What about in the market, sort of still deciding. Ok. A good number of people there, and then anyone else, like, just sort of miscellaneous. Ok. Some of us are still on bash. Ok. Great. That's really helpful. Again, depending on where you're at, we are planning to have content to support those parts of the journey. It does sound like there's a lot of people just starting off with their CDP journey, so a lot of these insights will be very applicable to you. So thank you for that. That being said, here's a quick agenda of how we're going to spend the next 45 minutes or so together. We'll first set the expectations. We'll then describe why organizational readiness is important for CDP. We'll then introduce our four-step framework, and we'll wrap up with key takeaways and Q&A. Sound good? Cool. All right, so let's first set expectations. We are really, really grateful that you are here. We know it's the last day. We know you had a choice to be here. So we want to ensure that the next hour or so is a valuable use of your time. So we have three promises for you all today. First, we will not sell you. We are not salespeople. We're not here to tell you all the great things about Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform. Regardless of what CDP you have, this session will provide you some value and some insight. Next, no technical jargon. We will not be getting into technical details. We will not be getting into the nitty-gritty features and details of any CDP. We are going to limit the number of acronyms we share with you. We know you've been inundated with those over the past few days. And last, we promise to deliver on real customer insights. Between Nina and I, we've worked with dozens of different clients, so we want to ensure that you can hear what other organizations have done and have experienced. Now, these examples are anonymized, so we're not going to be sharing any sort of logos with you. But rest assured, these are from the experiences that we have. And one more promise, let's have fun. This is the last day to early in the morning, so let's enjoy this. All right, Nina, the crowd has warmed up over to you. Thanks for warming everyone up. All right, so I'm here to tell you, for most of you who raised your hands and said that you're at the beginning of your CDP journey, you're just starting to implement or considering, you're at the most fun part, in fact, like this week, right? Hopefully, you got to go out to many fun dinners. You got to go to the bash last night, you're being wined and dined. It's all fun. Well, when we think about organizational readiness, that's where the rubber meets the road. That's where things get really hard. The CDP Institute recently surveyed their members. These are folks who use and live and breathe customer data platforms every day. And when they asked them about how they use CDPs today, how they think about them, they found organizational readiness, not the technology, is the greatest challenge for new deployments. The tech is the easy part. It's the people and the process and the culture shifts behind it that really are going to help you either be successful or be a laggard in the space. So why is that the case? Why is thinking about organizational readiness and collaborative shift so important? Well, let's look at the promise of a customer data platform. A best-in-class customer data platform is collecting data from all different types of sources, from known customer data, from CRM to email to unknown customer data like behavioral data, device ID level data, first-party cookies. Then partner data is in the mix too. Second-party data, durable attributes from trusted third-party identifiers. The organization can take from all of these different disparate data sources and start to formulate unified profiles, people profiles or account-level profiles if you have a B2B go to market. You're starting to create audiences, scale them through AI, and then activate them across all of these different channels, ranging from marketing channels, to Google, to Meta, to own tools for personalization on the site or in the app, and then back into customer systems too. You can send it back to a CRM, to email, to a data warehouse if you wanted to as well, all backed by governance. This means that a lot of different people within the organization have a role to play. A lot of those data assets live in different places. A lot of those activation channels are owned by entirely different teams. Well, that presents a really exciting and big opportunity for the organization. This opportunity to create these more complete and unified profiles that are accessible, usable across the entirety of the organization and not living in silos. It means things like being able to access data more quickly by being able to refresh it in a more automated fashion, hoping to reduce some of the manual efforts that go on today to collect data for the organization. It's also helping to hopefully impact some of the key metrics that the organization cares about, things like how they communicate and engage with customers in a more personalized way, and hopefully too to help convert their customers as well.

Now, when we think about how this plays out at more of an individual role, we've taken the time to assemble these fictitious Personas. Mary Marketer, Ted Technologist and Dan Data Architect. So let me tell you about the different roles that they have to play when we think about organizational readiness, some different, sometimes competing interests, and remember their names, they're going to come back again. So Mary Marketer, she, as a marketer, she's really focused on customer acquisition, especially as third-party cookies are disappearing imminently. She's definitely focused on building out comprehensive profiles for the organization. And as usual, she cares about making her media spend more efficient. She's always trying to do more with less. Now, Ted Technologist, he cares a lot about how the organization is using all of their different data assets. And he cares a lot about compliance, too, making sure that data is used at the right time and in the right way. And then his partner in crime, Dan Data Architect, he's really focused on data accuracy and quality. He cares a lot about customer trust and helping to foster that by having the right privacy tools in his CDP. So you can see these three different folks care about various different things. The reality is that they're going to have to start working together in order to make the CDP investment successful. So I'm going to leave you with one key takeaway right from the beginning of this session is that in order to be successful here, collaboration is the name of the game. And I think this quote from IDC couldn't sum it up better from one of their recent CDP MarketScapes. They say designing, planning, and implementing and executing a customer data platform is a collaborative approach. And with that being a collaborative process, CDPs require not only a technology upgrade, but a cultural shift. Again, making that same point, the technology, sometimes that's the easiest part to decide what vendor you're going with, talking about capabilities. It's figuring out the people and process behind it that are going to help you to be successful. So with that, let me get into our framework for success here. This is the meat of the presentation. How do you actually do this? How do you foster collaboration and set up people in process? So four steps here. First is team alignment. Then we'll talk about building the team, prioritizing use cases, and then measuring success. The way that we'll do this is I'm going to walk through the concept of each of these four pillars, and then Jerry's going to come in and give to us real customer insights of how people have done this well, and in some cases where they might have gotten tripped up, too.

All right, so the first step is team alignment. Now, with team alignment, the way that we think about this is how do you start to build consensus through collaboration? So many of you, especially the folks that raise your hand that are in the market for a CDP or you're just starting to implement, likely you went through some kind of RFI request for information from your vendors as part of a procurement process, asking about things like what different capabilities and features does that vendor have, what use cases can they execute? How easy or hard is adoption? My suggestion is to turn these questions back on yourselves as an organization. Ask yourself questions around "who", "what", "why". "Who", who is going to be the CDP driver or decider? Just to use a very quick car analogy, it's not great if no one is driving the car unless it's a fully vetted autonomous vehicle. But it's also not a great situation if everybody's driving the car. You need to have at least one person or one very specific group of individuals who are acting as the driver and decider of this project. Then you want to ask yourselves, "what" as an organization. What is it that you're trying to solve for? What are some of the key pain points within the organization that you're trying to solve for here? And then, "why". Why should the organization care? How is it going to impact their lives as individuals or help the organization as a whole and package that in a way that's going to be exciting? All right, so a little bit more about how you do this, how you rally an organization around this idea of implementing a CDP and get everybody on board and also excited. Really helpful here that I've seen other customers do well is to create a problem statement, something really simple that many people within the organization can understand about why you're investing in the first place. So here's an example, one that I see many customers use today is third-party cookies are going away and the brand acquisition strategy is going to be impacted. So to help offset, we're investing in a CDP to make sure that we can help offset some of what we're going to feel with third-party cookie deprecation. So now that you have the problem statement, you need to then communicate that through the rest of the organization. So one is evangelizing this information. How will it help? Well, a CDP can ingest more durable identifiers, help you work with more first-party data to harness your strategy on that, and also start to work with second and third-party partners as well. Two, communicate timelines and team impacts. People want to know what's coming next. They want to understand, "Well, when is the CDP going to be stood up? When will we start to have these new types of profiles and audiences available?" And share with them how it's going to change their day-to-day. If you're using another platform, when will the cutover time be? When do they need to think about building audiences in one place versus another? Three, clearly articulate what everyone role is to play. So who is the driver? Who are the team that are going to be supporting this? We're going to get in a minute to how you structure the team, and that'll play into number three here. And then four, if you can, share the long-term strategy. This is a good problem statement, but it's rooted in today. If you have the opportunity, share with your team what the three and five-year goals to help people get excited about where the CDP is going to take your organization into the future.

All right, so a couple of tips here on how to breed team alignment. And my key recommendation is to communicate, or over communicate in some cases, and also educate. So how do you do this? Again, these are based on customer examples and experiences that I've had in the field. So one is newsletters and podcasts. So some of this is thinking about what's the right way? How do your employees best consume information? At Adobe, we get a lot of newsletters. For your CDP team and folks within your organization who want to know more about the CDP, a newsletter, whether it's monthly or quarterly, sharing with the organization how the deployment is going, are you starting to build profiles? Are audiences coming together? Did you deploy that first use case? So everyone else in the team knows what's going on and is starting to see progress and hopefully impact. Podcasts. This is an interesting one. I worked with a customer who found that their employees best consumed information was through a podcast. So what they did is at the very start of the implementation, they rolled out a podcast series, and it was actually interviews with key executives at the organization who were part of their procurement process, who were sharing with the rest of the team why they were investing in a CDP, why they chose the CDP that they did, and really helped to get the rest of the organization excited and on board with this project, especially hearing from those executives. Second step, learning and badging. Now, this is an Adobe-specific one. Maybe some other vendors have some of these components, but we have as part of our Experience League Community, a host of product documentation communities, but also on-demand video assets that can help you learn about how this technology works. It can help you get up to speed quickly how the product works, how specific features work to make sure that folks who need it understand how these tools work in practice. So in addition to that, we also have as part of Adobe a certification program, too, which is cool. So if you think you are very proficient in CDPs, you can actually go ahead and take an exam. And if you pass, it'll certify you and badge you as a CDP expert. And by the way, you can brag about that on LinkedIn, but I encourage you to take advantage of some of these things if they're available to you. And then last but not least is office hours and Slack channels. Especially at the beginning of the use of the CDP, it's really important to have a touch point for the organization to ask questions of some of the key leaders, the core project team, of asking questions like, hey, how do I build an audience? Or how do I log in? Having a designated time like in office hours or Slack channel is really useful. And by the way, if you want, you can invite folks like Jerry or your consulting team who you're working with, or other agencies and partners if you feel like it'd be helpful to have them there.

All right, so I promised that Mary, Ted and Dan would come back here, and what I wanted to do is share with you, What are their different roles to play when it comes to team alignment? Well, Mary, in this example, she's going to be our budget holder. So it's Mary and her team that are operationalizing a lot of these conversations that are occurring around team alignment. If there's a podcast, it's going to be hosted and produced by Mary's team. It's her team that's going to be sending out a newsletter or encouraging people to join office hours or Slack channels. With Ted, he's going to just share some of these communications out to his team, especially in regard to how Mary and her project team might want to use specific data sources as they map to the use cases that she's identifying. And then Dan's going to do something similar for his team. He's going to start to share relevant communication that comes out from Mary's group, so that his group of data architects can understand how they should think about things from a governance and privacy perspective as well. All right, enough of the theory. Tell us how it happens for real, Jerry. All right, so we'll share with you the customer insights now. And the way these slides will work is that I'll give you the very clear, concise insight first, and then I'll describe to you the story or example that I have. So the first insight here is around all teams should share one clear vision. Like Nina mentioned, collaboration is a really important cornerstone of CDP. So it's really important that everyone can rally behind one vision or one problem statement. What it says, I care less about, just I care more so that the fact that you have one. The statement will be different depending on your organization, your business sort of priorities and your culture, but establishing one right away is super important. So the example here is an example of an organization doing this really, really well. It was a retailer that I worked with who puts a premium on their in-store experience, hospitality and delivering a really strong customer experience is super important to them. So for them, CDP was their way of introducing that in-store experience in a digital capacity. So what they did is they assembled a team that built a deck and a problem statement that spoke to the fact that this is our digital way of bringing that in-store experience online. And they shared this deck with all the teams, marketing, procurement, operations, in-store operations themselves. So everyone in the organization knew what the CDP was and why it was important to their overall business. The result, the outcome was actually really favorable, really positive, because the organization was sort of pulling the demand. It wasn't Adobe telling them, hey, you need to use this. It was the organization themselves saying, I want to know more about this or what's happening with the CDP coming from all departments. So that was a really, really strong example here. Another insight I'll share with you is around all teams have a responsibility to secure buy-in. So regardless of where you're at in the CDP process, it's really important that you have all the teams on the same page in the buy-in process. The example I'll share with you is an organization that could have benefited from this insight in the sense that I worked with a brick and mortar retailer whose technology team led the CDP selection process, which is common. I mean, there's nothing unusual about that. That's typically how it works. However, this technology team omitted marketing involvement throughout the upfront steps, specifically in that initial set of use case identification, which ultimately led to sort of a misalignment of business outcomes. IT had one idea in mind, marketing had a different idea in mind, and it led to a lot of friction when it came time to activate. So recommendation here is to ensure that as you go throughout the process, regardless of where you're at in the process, ensure that all the teams are on the same page as it relates to the CDP process. All right, Nina, back to you.

Thank you, Jerry. All right, so we're on to step number two here in this framework, which is building the team. So when we think about building the team, that's when we're going to start to talk about this concept of a center of excellence, a COE that supports the CDP investment. That was just a lot of acronyms. We said no technical jargon, but I didn't say no acronyms. All right, so a little bit about the COE. What the COE does, they're responsible for figuring out and deciding who's doing what, when. And I'm about to talk about more exactly what they'll do, but a few disclaimers here. One is that different models of a COE are going to work for different types of organizations. So let's say you're a multi conglomerate or you're a multinational organization where you have different lines of business or geographies operating somewhat independently. If that's the case, a more distributed COE might work for you where there's kind of multiple leaders, but for the vast majority of organizations, a more streamlined approach, where there's one centralized COE, is going to work well. I also want to let you know, especially before we get into responsibilities, this does not mean hiring and going out and acquiring new roles or headcounts. Jerry can attest to this, that more often than not, this is taking existing team members and carving out some of their day-to-day to help with the role that they're playing in the COE. Also important to consider as you're thinking about the COE and some of their responsibility is what unique skills within your organization can you draw upon. And ideally, there's a mix of different skills, folks who maybe have more of a project management background and maybe folks who are technical, too. And then last but not least, the COE should be a living organism. So over time it should change based on where your organization is on your CDP Journey and what your needs are. So what it's going to look like at the time of implementation can and should look different as you get into a run-and-operate phase. All right, so what does the COE do exactly? Well, they do a lot of things. So let me walk through some of these. One, it's the COE who's tasked with implementation. So they're going to be taking a big role in deciding kind of how they're going to work across various different partner organizations, different stakeholders, to actually stand up and design what the CDP is going to look like. Another critical role of the COE is owning the audience creation process. So it's this team that's going to decide the process through which audiences are built, things like naming conventions, organization, governance of audiences, too. Integrations, so this is a big component of implementations, is getting in those data inputs, all of the different data sources that'll inform the profile and then the outbound integrations as well. So that when you formulate audiences where you then send them for activation. The COE is going to be responsible for making sure those integrations are stood up and working as they should be. The COE is also going to take a big hand in project execution. So really looking at the timeline and the project plan and making sure that they're driving against timelines and key milestones. They're also going to own an internal roadmap. So playing a part in deciding what use cases go first, what's the order of operations and priority, and we'll talk more about that too. Vendor management. So hopefully you're working with Adobe, but if not some other vendor and making sure to understand from them what their own internal roadmap is so that you can understand key shifts in the project and be aware of features that you can take advantage of as they come available to you. The COE is also going to work on governance and usage. So deciding what data is used, where and when and how, but also thinking about internal employees and how they will have specific capabilities or controls on how they use the DMP. So just quick example there. If you're working with an agency partner, you might think about giving them different levels of access to the product than you would someone who maybe sits on the core COE. The COE is also going to be responsible for things like communication, sharing updates to the rest of the organization. How's the implementation going? Are you starting to build audiences? Are you starting to execute use cases? They're going to play a role in measurement of figuring out how to understand if different use cases or campaigns or initiatives performed well, as they should be. And then the COE is also going to drive education and adoption. They're going to make sure that key stakeholders, folks who are using the CDP, have the tools and have gone through the trainings or taking on-demand courses so that they know how to use it. And the COE is also going to help foster adoption, making sure that teams are starting to build the COE or the CDP into some of their day-to-day practices.

Okay, so how does a COE actually look? How do you kind of operationalize it? So let me walk through this bit of an eye chart with you. Typically in most organizations, what we see is there is a core project team that's driving the day-to-day, supported by some stakeholders, with executives kind of on that outer ring, making sure largely that things are going well and as they should be. So with the core team, these are just examples here. And for some organizations, the core team is one person. For some organizations, it could be 5, 10, 20 people. Oftentimes this is going to consist of a product manager, like a product owner of the CDP, someone who's just a manager of the project, someone in more of a PMO function. And then, especially at the time of the implementation, IT and data engineering teams are going to play a critical role as we think about bringing data into the equation, and privacy teams as well. They want a seat at the table, too, to make sure that they have a good understanding of how are these different data sources and use cases going to be used and where. Now, again, the core team, they drive the day-to-day. They own the project plan, they own the roadmap, they are getting the stuff done. The stakeholder team, they're helping the core project team decide what are the key use cases that the organization should go after. They're going to help navigate some of those cross-functional decisions that might be new for the team as they're working together in this new, more collaborative environment. And then the executive stakeholders, more often than not, these are made up of folks who actually own the budget or own the contract. They're going to help the team understand what is the key priority in terms of use cases, the north star of the organization, and help to remove, as much as they can, any roadblocks that the core team is facing.

So let's bring Mary, Ted, and Dan back here to help you understand what roles they have to play when it comes to the COE in this framework. And again, remember, these are examples. I'm sure you have many other types of roles at your organization. With Mary, she's going to supply someone to lead on the core project team because it's her team that owns the budget. They're really kind of the key stakeholder here. Mary herself, she might serve on the steering or executive committee because it's her organization that owns the contract, and she wants to make sure she's playing a key role in sharing to the team critical priorities. With Ted, the technologist, he's going to make sure that one of his team members sits on the core project team, but only during the time of implementation, primarily to make sure that he's working with the core team to get the data sources available to them, to start to bring in and utilize. And then Dan, similar story to him, he's going to make sure that someone from his privacy and governance team is sitting on the core project team, especially at the start, to make sure that how consent is managed, how different data sources are governed, that he's comfortable with them in terms of the organization's own policies and regulation that they're contending with. Dan's going to want to stay on as part of that executive stakeholder committee. He wants to make sure to continue to be read out as new use cases come online so that he understands how his team should be involved when it comes to additional privacy considerations. All right, Jerry, back to you. All right, so for our next real customer insight, we are talking about assigning responsibilities prior to CDP activation. We hear this all the time, everyone's busy. Everyone has a lot on their plates. No one wants to get more work thrown at them. But with the CDP, if you do it right, you can actually create efficiencies within your organization over time that may not be initially sort of understood from the teams. So our recommendation here is to do this as soon as possible and as often as possible. The example I'll share with you is an organization that could have benefited from this insight. I worked with a telecommunications firm that introduced the CDP across multiple lines of business. They had multiple business units and the implementation went well. And they had clear use cases and everything was fine. But they assigned all the responsibilities after the fact, and they said, "All right, the CDP is ready to go. Everyone go do it." Which obviously led to slow adoption because, again, these teams were already overworked in terms of all the additional responsibilities they had. And as Nina mentioned, typically we're not hiring net new roles for CDP. The responsibilities are typically modifications for existing roles. So in this particular organization, the team initially resisted those new responsibilities. It took a little bit longer in order for us to get actual value from the CDP implementation. So I know some of you have already activated or about to activate your CDPs. If you haven't done this yet, that's okay. I would just say stop and recognize the fact that you need to tell your teams what the responsibilities are and tell them often so that they can start to emotionally, mentally prepare for these newfound responsibilities. Back to you, Nina. All right. So we've made it onto step number three here in our road to preparation, which is prioritizing use cases. And really, this is all about deciding what comes first. You can't start with all the use cases, you gotta take some steps to boil it down. So here's my thoughts as you go through that process of deciding what's the most important thing to start with. One is take stock of what you're doing today. Do you have maybe a data management platform that you're using and evolving off of? Are you perhaps using another CDP? Maybe you're managing all of your audiences today in Excel. Whatever the case may be, my recommendation here is to take stock of what you're doing today to see is there anything about those existing processes that's working well for you? If there are, take some of those use cases and some of those ways of working and bring that forward to the CDP implementation as you think about prioritization here. Second step, consider a pilot. So if you're in a large organization, consider just testing out a use case in maybe a smaller market or smaller geo. But if you're at a smaller organization or more medium-sized, try to pick something that's low-hanging fruit that you think might be a little bit easier to start with. I also highly suggest here taking a testing mindset to all of this. Test a use case, learn from it and then repeat as needed and make tweaks along the way. And then I stole this one from Jerry, but just take action. If it's hard to decide what comes first, just pick something. Start to get your feet wet, get a feel for things.

Now I wanted to share with you a step-by-step view into how CDPs actually get implemented, and share with you why prioritizing use cases is so critical. When you think about implementation end to end, there's five steps. It's defining, defining the use-cases and KPIs. Then you're getting into design, figuring out what the data model is and the schemas. As you get into building, this is when you're starting to ingest data, formulate audiences, and then you go live, hopefully into production, successfully. And then start to see value and measure it. Well, take a look at where you get into use-cases. It's at the very first step, which is why deciding on what some of your initial ones are is so important, because it's informing everything that comes afterward. Now one other note here that I want to acknowledge is that we hope that implementations in some case lasts forever. And what I mean by that is we're hoping that, as an organization, over time you continue to adopt new use-cases, that your organization is changing. You're trying to solve for different things. So there's going to be new projects, new campaigns that you want to tackle and alongside of that, new data sources that you come online. But all of that to say taking the step to define the use-cases upfront, very important.

All right. Jerry, back to you. All right, so Mary is in charge here. It's no surprise that marketing is the lead stakeholder when it comes to use case prioritization because marketing is ultimately the team that's activating, measuring and strategizing on use cases. So marketing has a very key role to play, but IT and data certainly have a strong role also. From the tech perspective, we'll want to ensure that CDP is operating as it should and all the supporting marketing stack and channels are operating as they should also. From the data perspective, it's really critical that team is ensuring that the data is available and ready to activate on. A situation I often see is that marketing has an idea for a great use case. I mean, all the marketing use cases are great, but they have a great use case that's using a specific piece of data that's maybe not available or just a little bit hard to navigate. The data team will be able to offer up an alternative piece of data that can get the job done pretty closely. So really strong collaborative sort of effort here as it relates to prioritizing use cases. Let's jump into two examples here. The first example is that whenever possible, let's leverage existing marketing campaigns that we have available. Let's leverage those assets, let's leverage that work that's already been done. I run into situations all the time in which we're trying to build net new campaigns for CDP activation, and that's, you know, you can do that, but it's much easier when you're leveraging the work that's already been done. CDP should naturally integrate into everything you're doing already. So it makes sense to have your existing marketing collateral in there because there was a lot of time and effort put into that. Now the example here is an entertainment firm that I worked with. We were trying to figure out what the best sort of initial use cases were. We were debating back and forth all while the marketing team was preparing for their large annual marquee event, the thing that everyone gets excited for each year. So what we ultimately decided to do was to test some supplemental marketing activities on this major event, this marquee event. And we tested a few things and the business results weren't necessarily the important thing. We had fine business results. We discussed them and debated them. What was important here is that because we were able to demonstrate that, "Hey, we can use the CDP for our major event that everyone is all hands on deck for." It built a lot of confidence and a lot of trust in the system that, "Hey, this isn't so scary. This can help us out. This can be business as usual." So that was really, the win there is the fact that we used it for the big event, not necessarily the initial set of outcomes. Another example here is that hits are greater than home runs. I know we heard from MLB yesterday and I think today is opening day - and games might have started now. - I think so. I don't know on East Coast, but hits are greater than home runs in the sense that, let's prioritize getting some momentum, let's prioritize getting some establishing business as usual for CDP before we bite off something really, really ambitious. You'll get there, I swear. But let's do things that we know will be effective and that will demonstrate the CDP functionality before we try to get super ambitious. That information, that insight would have been super helpful for this example I'll share with you, I worked with an e-tailor who was really excited about CDP, like super excited, which is great because CDPs are fun and it's a real exciting thing to work on. But this excitement led to too much ambition and they wanted to go shoot for the moon in the very first set of use cases, which was just, we're not setting ourselves up for success. We had too many data sources. We had too many channels. It was just too big, too soon.

So what happened was there was many issues initially. We were delayed a few weeks, led into a few months, a lot of debate, a lot of friction, and it just was not the ideal setup for building confidence in CDP within the organization. Now, ultimately we solved it and figured out what to do, but that solution was to scale back those use cases. So really, had we just started off with the more bite-sized use cases in the first place, we would have got to those larger use cases much sooner. But again, I cannot emphasize this enough, I know you're here at Summit and you see all these cool things that other organizations are doing, but I really must emphasize, let's get some momentum. Let's take the right actions before getting to these really big, complicated use cases. All right, Nina, tell us about our last step. All right, so the last step here in this preparation framework is measuring for success. Maybe this will come as a surprise to some people in the room, but I work with so many organizations who actually haven't taken the time to define what the key performance indicators are for the organizations. What metrics are they going to track? Which is really surprising and concerning because how can you ever tell if you're going to be successful if you don't know how you're going to track or measure that? So actually taking the time to decide what is it that your organization cares about, what are those key KPIs is critical. And then taking the time to align on that, of having Dan, and Mary, and Ted who we've been talking about all along, work together to decide what are some of those maybe cross-functional KPIs, that matter as well. Also take time to stop and check along the way. So what I mean by that is as you're in the process of deploying use cases, it can be so exciting to see some results and then quickly move on to the next one. Well, make sure that you're embedding time into your process to take a pause and see, well, did you hit the metric that you were looking to? But also how did things work from a process perspective? Was the COE that we talked about earlier that you've set up those people in process, did that serve you well or do you need to make specific tweaks that are going to enable you to be more successful in the future? Last but not least, when we think about measuring success is take into account some of the softer metrics that your organization might be feeling. Are people who within the organization, who maybe haven't engaged together or worked together before, are they collaborating? Are they communicating more effectively? Are their jobs a little bit more efficient by use of the CDP itself and the COE that's operating in the scenes behind it, really helping people to get access to the data that they need more quickly? I wanted to share with you here a full view into a data management maturity path that we've outlined and some of the KPIs that ladder back up to it. I'm going to start actually midway through at Actionable Profiles because as we talked about, that's really where the CDP is coming into play when you start to bring different data sources in and then formulate those profiles. Now when you get into this initial step of just bringing different data sources together across different teams of technologies, you can start to look at team-focused KPIs. This could be things like volume of profiles, number of different segments that you've created, number of different points of activation. Now, as you become more mature, you're starting to shift that data management focus from teams to departments. And with that, the KPIs are hopefully shifting as well. You can start to look at things within the team department around workflow efficiency, campaign effectiveness, number of different channels that you're able to activate audiences to. And then once you get to enterprise adoption, this is where you're taking those unified, actionable profiles, whether it's at the consumer level or account level, and looking at them and having them available to all different departments or line of businesses. And this unlocks enterprise-wide KPIs. You can start to look at how do marketing and IT teams work more efficiently together, actually measuring some of those different things. Number of different teams that are collaborating, working with one another, and then campaign effectiveness across the organization, not just looking at it at a department or team level now. All right. Back to Mary, Ted and Dan. So across our Personas, it is really important that we all have our own individual success metrics. We provided some examples here for you. These may be different for your organization, but these are some of the commonalities that we see across the organizations that we work with. So for marketing, we often see number of use cases activated, and number of audiences or segments activated, in addition to number of hours saved. For the technology teams, we're looking at percentage uptime for the CDP and also the corresponding Martech stack, in addition to hours saved. And then for the data team, we're looking typically at the number of data sources that have been ingested and then also hours saved. But the ultimate sort of metric that keeps us all grounded and keeps us all altogether are the business outcomes. How is this changing our business? How is this growing revenue? How is this creating efficiencies for us? So it's okay to have the individual metrics, but again, we want to ensure that we're keeping it tied to those business outcomes. So two final insights for you. The first one is around holding your cross-functional teams accountable. Obviously, all this collaboration won't be effective if one team is not holding up their end of the bargain. So how this is done is less important, again, than the fact that it is being done. So here's an example of a customer that I worked with. It was an entertainment firm, and they had one business unit that was using CDP, but was not activating on CDP. So this organization actually has a series of meetings set up where all of the business units can review their use of CDP and ask questions of each other, say, "Hey, why are you using it this way and not that way?" So in this meeting, this one business unit was called out in the sense that they were not activating on CDP. And we had a really good conversation across all the different business units to say, "Hey, are you doing something? Why are you doing this?" Like, what's going on, and it led to a really productive conversation and a number of different insights. This organization was very direct, so that mechanism may not be appropriate for your organization, but again, it's less important what that mechanism is and the fact that you have something in place so that this cross-functional accountability can be brought to life. All right, one final insight for you. It's a simple one. It's asking the question, does our CDP make my job easier? That is the reason your organization is making this investment into CDP, and you should be able to answer this in the affirmative. So I don't have a specific customer example to give you here because I ask all of my customers this, but let's say that you are operating and executing some high-impact use cases. Stop and ask yourself this question. Again, we hope that you answer this in the affirmative, but if you don't revisit those four steps that we looked at, because likely the opportunity is somewhere in there.

Computer's a little hungover from the week. So tips to get started today and hopefully take home to the rest of your colleagues who may be weren't here today. One, and I gave this away right at the beginning, is that collaboration is going to help you win here. And what I mean by that is taking the time to have Mary, Ted and Dan work together really through the concept of the center of excellence that we talked about, put together those processes in place, put together those kind of cultural changes that we talked about to foster this collaboration, because as these teams work together, that's where you're going to start to see success as you implement the CDP. Two, take your show on the road. So we talked about the importance of communicating and evangelizing for the purpose of getting your organization really excited about the CDP investment and understanding why it's going to make a big impact both for the organization and the day-to-day. And we talked about that through the lens of things like newsletters, and podcasts, and office hours to help with getting the rest of the organization on board. And then last but not least is just start to take action. Maybe start on your plane ride home to think about, as you're standing up a CDP, who could be part of your core project team? What is your organization's problem statement that we talked about at the beginning? Taking some of those small steps to get yourself on the path to being fully prepared and ready to take on your new investment. If you want to continue this conversation, specifically, scan this QR code or enter this link so that you can carry on this conversation on Experience League. We do have some materials there as it relates to CDP organization readiness. So you can carry on this conversation there. And this is the final slide, I promise. There are three additional CDP sessions today. There's one at 10:30, and then there's two at 01:00. All great sessions. I would personally recommend checking out the AI and CDP session at 01:00. There's some really, really cool insights there. So, that being said, I don't see anyone lined up. Nina and I will be here afterwards if you want to come up to us and discuss or ask any questions. But thank you so much for attending our session. Safe travels home and enjoy your final day at Summit.