An Ecosystem Approach To Data for End-to-End Solutions
“What’s in your stack?”
“How deep is your stack?”
“My stack is not efficient at all!”
Sound familiar? Hallway conversations overheard not at a poker table in Vegas, but at a marketing conference in Denver. The “stack” refers to the group of technologies that marketing teams use to market to prospects and customers. The fundamental issue of a disjointed stack persists conference after conference as software providers tout their piece of the overall puzzle that marketers need, and companies try to market effectively with a bandaged hodge-podge of solutions.
The search for marketing solutions
Literally thousands of technologies and early-stage startups tout data and analytical tools that promise to transform data into insight. Just look at Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape -- now tracking nearly 7,000 technology companies – to get a sense of the breadth of tools available. It’s overwhelming, and the pressure to convert prospects into customers remains.
In one of my previous roles, I led a digital marketing team, and I was courted by companies every week that claimed they had the right tool or service to make my life better.
Given the complexity of our in-house marketing stack and the vastness of the data my team relied on to make business decisions, I listened to every pitch, hoping one of them had technology that solved my issues with one end-to-end solution. Alas, their solutions were either siloed, ineffective or incomplete. I had to kluge together disparate tools to come up with a comprehensive solution, and that made it difficult to spur the growth we needed.
Comprehensive solutions through partnerships
The first sign that things were changing for the better was when I was presented a total solution for account-based marketing (ABM) through Dun & Bradstreet and its partner ecosystem. The Dun & Bradstreet data enriched my CRM data, and I worked with a partner of theirs on a master data management (MDM) solution. The workflow was seamless and the ROI potential was undeniable. It changed my view of Dun and Bradstreet as a singular data provider to a company with the ability to create comprehensive solutions.
I joined Dun & Bradstreet a few years later to help others like me – and those beyond the marketing department – leverage our vast and rich B2B data. With our Live Business Identity, data can be easily sliced into actionable morsels for customers. We provide solutions for teams across finance, marketing, procurement, and compliance, and we continuously evolve and enhance that data. But we also understand our solutions portfolio can always be further enhanced through strategic partner relationships.
In fact, strong partnerships with forward-thinking, product-focused companies are key. As a natural evolution, our hundreds of millions of business records, 176 years of data history and product innovation, married to a complementary partner ecosystem, has taken shape to enable customers to focus on data insights that are meaningful and actionable.
Partners help activate data and insights
Alliances and partnerships between companies to solve customer needs is certainly not a new idea, but Dun & Bradstreet is putting renewed focus on building out our robust ecosystem.
The recent launch of our digital partner story and ecosystem is an integral part of this value proposition. The ability to integrate core Dun & Bradstreet data into partner platforms to activate meaningful data and insights is what sets us apart. Each of our 190+ partners help solve business issues that often span multiple departments and teams within a company. Delivering these end-to-end solutions across the organization has become our mantra, and our partner ecosystem is core to this vision.
Conferences come and go, and shiny new tools may grab the spotlight, but without a firm strategy and a cohesive solution that’s easy to integrate, customers will continue to struggle with effectiveness and ROI. Through our ecosystem approach, we want to help companies solve these challenges and improve performance.
Want to scale faster with trusted business data? Learn how to become a partner today.