At a recent CDP demo, a nervous client asked the vendor if they had a connector to Salesforce Sales Cloud. The vendor replied affirmatively, but the truth is most customer data platform (CDP) vendors have disappointing packaged connectors. This is due to the enterprise “portlets” race of the late 2000s and early 2010s, which saw vendors bragging about the number of portlets in their catalogues. However, these were often different in provenance, support, usability, performance, and security, and often had to be modified or rewritten from scratch.
Fast forward to today, and CDP vendors are succumbing to the same pressures their portal brethren endured. If customers value a diverse catalog of connectors, then as a CDP vendor, they must display many of them, ready or not. In CDP demos, connectors appear on the screen as neat blocks, but in many cases, a single connector cannot possibly address the complexity of the martech platform on the other end. Consider Salesforce Sales Cloud, where the platform suffers from a problematic object model that most licensees contort or heavily extend.
In addition, portals died out due to the immaturity of enterprise applications, which often lacked common content and metadata models, employed diverse access control regimes, exhibited different UX models and sometimes exposed low-quality data. This can also be seen with CDPs today, where depending on how you scope a CDP effort, the CDP may expose the immaturity of your broader customer data management regime.
Therefore, when selecting a CDP vendor, don’t overweight those who claim to have connector catalogs that match up well against your stack. Instead, you should follow an agile CDP selection process that concludes with a competitive bake-off and a more technical proof of concept (PoC) with one or two finalists. This is a great environment to test a few essential connectors, and understand the level of effort to overhaul where necessary. Don’t believe CDP vendors who promise “quick start” packages to accelerate an initial implementation, as connector development can take more than a few months. Budget your resources accordingly, and always consider the complexity of the martech platform you’re connecting to.
Originally reported by Martech: https://martech.org/the-cdp-connector-myth/
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