The seventh scenario or business use case for Customer Data Platform (CDP) technology is B2B Marketing Support. (The other scenarios are described here: Scenario 1, Scenario 2, Scenario 3. Scenario 4, Scenario 5 and Scenario 6 .)

B2B Brings Unique Challenges

Challenges of B2B marketing can differ from B2C scenarios. You need to be able to do all your analysis, segmentation, reporting, dashboards and so on at at organization level and then, if possible, drill down to individual level.

Or to put it another way, "organization" needs to become a first-class object.

At a minimum, CDPs that support this scenario provide additional capabilities to map individual customers to an account and/or organization. Individuals can move across organizations or be part of multiple accounts too. In addition, all the CDP services, such as data integration, segmentation, and analytics can then be carried out at an account or organization level in addition to user level.

How do the Tools fare?

Most CDP vendors in our evaluations target B2C use cases. Some will claim they support B2B but in reality very few fully support B2B needs. If this scenario is important for you, you should make this an important shortlisting criteria. Because if a tool is not architected to support aggregation at account level, then no amount of customization will be able to give you proper B2B focus.

Figure: Evergage offers some B2B services

RSG can help you with your analysis. If you are a subscriber, you can use our RealQuadrant Shortlist Generator to find out which CDP vendors excel at this scenario. Our evaluations also call out specific capabilities for this scenario for each vendor.