Navigating the CDP Landscape: Gartner's Magic Quadrant and Beyond
Gartner broke the MarTech community by arraying four squares with two lines running through them that concluded Salesforce should be your CDP. But.. really?
Steven Aldrich
I love a good magic tiles, it gives the contenders in the space bragging rights and opportunity to go to their enterprise prospects and say “hey look, Gartner takes us seriously, so let’s chat stacks and tools!” 💥 In an imperfect world where decisions on marketing technology are often made on underdelivered promises (seriously, this happens a lot) and are at the mercy of an unending integration backlog, there’s anathema at these seemingly pay to play promotion models that feed the all-consuming MarTech beast of logo growth in pursuit of becoming the next big Unicorn.
But let’s take a step back and look a bit deeper at what market forces are in play that have put a market research company’s executive summary into the spotlight so we can draw our own conclusions effectively:
1️⃣ MarTech stacks are shrinking, albeit by a mere 8% (credit to Scott Brinker and ChieftMarTech for this stat) and while the overall industry is growing, these types of trends leave some sweat across the brows of the armchair experts investors rely on.
2️⃣ CDPs have undergone a crisis of identity, with MANY new players entering the space in the last 3 years and the technological methodology of how a CDP should function being its chief evolution (shoutout to Hightouch and Census for being leaders of this innovation).
3️⃣ As derived from many of our clients and projects, there exists a lack of clarity on what value does a CDP bring to the table, especially if it wasn’t instrumented correctly, putting pressure on renewal cycles and delaying decisions on new technology.
Keeping this context in mind, let’s look at the weighting that Gartner has given to it’s CDP criteria.
High:
- Market Understanding
- Offering (Product) Strategy
- Innovation
Medium:
- Sales Strategy
- Vertical/Industry Strategy
These weights are heavily leaning on the business, its processes, and its ability to position itself effectively; these weights make sense given that market forces are putting pressure on what really matters, i.e. the product product itself (let’s say it’s represented at about 30% of the combined Medium + High criteria).
So bearing all this in mind, how do you form an opinion on the CDP space, let alone single vendor? Here’s my approach:
1️⃣ Does the product demonstrate the ability for you to consolidate and activate your data that you otherwise couldn’t do or would spend endless cycles in engineering to accomplish
2️⃣ Would you be able to achieve incrementally more business cases with the tool than without it
3️⃣ Does the company have a vested interest and track record in building additional integrations and capabilities specific to your vertical and do you feel at least moderately confident that 3 years from now, this tool will still be effective and doing 1 and 2 above?
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