Marketing owns the Customer Data! Does it?

The Customer, the elusive entity that every business is about – or at least should be about.

The Customer gets targeted, marketed to, sold to, serviced, analysed, shall have a positive customer experience, and sometimes even is made happy.

The ‘customer’ as an entity is owned by the marketing department, err, the service department, oops, sales … or is it IT? After all IT is likely to run the CRM system. If it is not a cloud system, that is.

In reality it is different in every company and probably rightfully so.

On the other hand every department has their own requirements and the ‘owner’ of an entity is likely the one who decides upon the relative priorities of these requirements. And the fulfillment of requirements regularly decides upon the effectiveness and efficiency a business unit can operate with.

Now the marketing department is heavily invested in collecting all data that a customer leaves behind in order to understand behaviours and be able to entice known and unknown customers into buying (in the case of a B2C business) or solidifying the lead to an extent that it can be handed over to the sales department (in case of a B2B business). They are interested in lots of attributes, segmentation, slicing and dicing towards various dimensions. Born were data Management Platforms, and Customer Data Platforms, and overall a very thriving industry of Marketing Technology.

The sales department now is interested in opportunity management, CPQ (configure, price, quote), relationship with the buyers and their potential influencers, closing the deal as efficiently as possible. Born is a world of sales support software.

The service departments are mainly dealing with customers post sales, or when there are questions/issues coming up in the course of the buying journey, trying to resolve them as efficient as possible. This helped the creation of more classes of enterprise software.

These times it is easy to purchase and deploy them, with the help of the cloud and decentralized budgets.