Hot Takes

Now That You Have Big Data, It’s Time to Talk About Smart Data

Marketing Revenue

Big Data has been one of the major buzzwords of the last 5 years.

Everyone rushed to build all the required infrastructure to support them: CDP, ETL, reverse ETL, data warehouses, and plugging them across their stacks.

Great companies like Snowflake, Segment, and Fivetran flourished in this period helping customers gather, route, synchronize, and store the huge amounts of data that was being generated all across the funnel, from the first touchpoint with a user down to their whole customer journey.

That’s great. I love data-driven companies and I think, at least in the tech space, it’s time to call the Big Data war won. Most companies nowadays have a horde of data about their prospects and customers. 

So…has the time come for celebrations?

Well, no.

There’s actually a lot of difference between having a lot of data and being data-driven.

Two major steps are still missing for most companies:

1. Having Good Data

I’ve looked into hundreds of CRM and MAP accounts, they are full of data! Useless data, most of the time. They’re outdated, incomplete and very often they are treated as free text making them very difficult to interact with.

Job title is a great example. Most companies ask for this information… but as a free text field. This results in hundreds of variations for each job role and is a nightmare when you need to understand the seniority and department of a contact.

2. Making Data Discoverable and Actionable

This is the most critical part of the equation. 

Even if your team has done a great job at gathering the right information from users, the abundance of data points makes it very difficult to surface the right information at the right time to the person that needs it the most.

Most of the time this works the other way around. The operator has to chase data across multiple platforms and teams with the Data Scientists team being the gatekeeper and bottleneck most of the time.

Real actionability is even farther away, most companies I’ve seen just rely on some simple if/then rules that are far from perfect and from being the OS of a data-driven company.

And this is exactly why we’re building Breadcrumbs.