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Quick Guide: The Differences Between DMPs, CRMs & CDPs

Different martech tools offer different advantages during the customer journey. See how a CDP, CRM, and DMP serve different purposes and work together to help your revenue team.

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8

Chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

CRMs​

Chapter 3

CDPs

Chapter 4

DMPs

Chapter 5

How These Data Platforms Work Together

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Putting together a tech stack that enables revenue growth is critically important for B2B sales and marketing teams. But with more than 8,000 solutions (and counting!) competing for your business, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Trickier still, many of the technology categories overlap.

Case in point: CRMs, CDPs, and DMPs. They are all vital tools in customer data management. However, they all have different purposes.

If you ever wanted to make sense of this particular alphabet soup, let’s take a closer look at these platforms and their differences.

Chapter 2

CRMs

CRM stands for customer relationship management. These systems capture data about customers, their characteristics, and how they have interacted with your business.

Leading CRMs — such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics — will also include:

  • First party tracking data to help you understand how your contacts have interacted with your website
  • Marketing automation for emails and SMS communications with your contacts
  • Robust connectivity with other marketing tools like 6sense, Marketo, Clari, Mutiny, Drift, and many more

Strengths

CRMs are foundational tools for revenue teams because they make it easy to:

  • Keep track of your contacts
  • Record your interactions with them
  • See their progress through your sales pipeline
  • Create marketing automations based on pipeline progression
  • Analyze won-lost rates
  • Spot dropoff points in your sales process
  • Analyze the performance of sales team members

Weaknesses

  • CRMs are great for understanding and marketing to known individuals, but they primarily handle first-party data. They don’t help you understand what your contacts are researching on other websites, and they offer no insight into the behavior of accounts you would like to land, but who have not filled out a form or answered your calls or emails.
  • CRMs also often rely on some amount of manual entry in order to bring insights from third-party platforms. For instance, a company may offer a lot of clues about their needs through a chatbot on your site, but unless that data is automatically piped into your CRM, it’ll stay in its data silo, leaving sales representatives unaware of opportunities

Chapter 3

CDPs

CDP stands for customer data platform. 6sense has an embedded CDP; it’s one of the cornerstones for how we serve our customers.

A CDP breaks down data silos by:

  • Importing data from the various platforms in your tech stack
  • Creating a customer profile that captures your first-party data (CRM, chatbots, advertising campaigns, email marketing tools, etc.) and
  • Data from other sources, such as the intent data from 6sense (which accounts are in-market, which are an ideal fit, their buying stage, their search keywords and competitor research, etc.).

The CDP then pushes these insights back out to your various tools, which helps you deliver consistent sales and marketing messages. The best CDPs can even create dynamic audience segments so you can rapidly switch messaging to match changes in your prospect’s buying journey.

Strengths

  • Breaks down data silos
  • Orchestrates messaging and campaigns
  • Can add valuable data and context to CRM records, helping sales representatives focus on the most likely buyers

Weaknesses

Chapter 4

DMPs

DMP stands for data management platform — which sounds a whole lot like customer data platform, but serves a very different purpose.

While CDPs are used to store personal information – which may be stored for a long time so the company can analyze customer trends – DMP data is fleeting. That’s because DMP data is primarily used for ad targeting, and uses anonymized third-party signals to define audience segments like “junk food enthusiast,” “avid investor,” or “planning a trip to Orlando.”

Let’s use Joan Alpha as an example.

Your CDP might capture Joan Alpha’s:

  • Full name
  • Birthday
  • Email Address
  • Street Address
  • Phone Number
  • Purchase history from your company
  • Interactions with your site and mobile app
  • What questions she has asked your chatbot
  • Which content she has read on your site
  • Which coupons she uses.

A DMP would see that “Anonymous User #h831Mfx767q” searched for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, is researching real estate investment trusts, and has been searching the web for Florida Hotels and Disney World tickets.

That anonymous user — Joan — would then be sorted into certain audience segments that have a short shelf life. If Joan hasn’t searched for info about Orlando hotels and theme park tickets in 90 days, she would be removed from the “planning a trip to Orlando” segment.

Strengths

  • Useful for building digital advertising campaigns for people who aren’t known customers, but who you’d like to reach.

Weaknesses

  • Uses third-party data, and quality varies. Facebook, for instance, has struggled with its audience segmentation since Apple implemented privacy features with iOS 14.5, cutting off a vital source of data to its DMP.

Chapter 5

How These Data Platforms Work Together

CRMs, CDPs, and DMPs all come together to establish a bigger picture of the customer journey.

  • DMPs can help you build awareness among target customers.
  • CDPs help to start building a profile of visitors to your site, will attach their contact records and other details as they become available, and will push insights out to other platforms to help you activate marketing campaigns or initiate better conversations.
  • CRMs help to keep track of the relationship in progress with new and existing customers.

6sense Revenue AI™ has transformed results for some of the biggest brands across the world by helping these tools work together. An integrated tech stack provides actionable insights and automations that help marketing and sales teams stay focused and generate more revenue. To learn more, book a demo today and see how we can deliver more value for your business.

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The 6sense Team