How to unify customer data using tools you already have

Personalization is no longer optional. Customers expect a seamless, relevant experience at every touchpoint. For most marketers, however, this ambition is met with the harsh reality of limited data. 

The marketing team has its dataset, sales has its CRM and essential product and transactional data are locked away and inaccessible in other systems. Too often, this data fragmentation is a major roadblock. A significant business event, such as a merger and acquisition or a strategic shift toward growth from existing customers, can expose and accelerate the need to unify this data. Without a dedicated Customer Data Platform (CDP) or data warehouse, achieving a single, unified customer view can seem impossibly distant.

That leads to a Catch-22: you cannot prove marketing’s impact without better data, and you cannot get approval for better data without first proving your impact. However, you can get closer to that 360-degree view using the tools you already have, building a business case for future investment by establishing what’s possible today.

Create a unified view with existing tools

For organizations without a comprehensive data platform, a practical, resourceful and impactful alternative exists. It uses technology you already own, specifically your CRM and business intelligence (BI) tools, like Power BI or Tableau.

Although this is a short-term fix and not a long-term platform replacement, it’s a powerful way to make immediate progress. The strategy is straightforward:

• Funnel the data: The central idea is to pipe key data sources, such as CRM data and product ownership information, into a BI tool.
• Stitch it together: Within the BI tool, this disparate data can be “stitched” together to create a dynamic and intuitive dashboard. This serves as a visual representation of your combined data rather than a permanent data warehouse.
• Create a marketing sandbox: This dashboard serves as a safe environment where you can slice and dice the complete dataset to explore audiences and understand numbers without needing to access live source systems or requesting assistance from the data team.

This contact universe dashboard provides an immediate, holistic view of your audience, enabling you to segment and target with a level of precision that was previously impossible.

From a unified view to an enriched audience

With this, you can begin to identify critical gaps in your data. For example, the dashboard might reveal that you only have two contacts at a key target account or that the audience for a new campaign is too small to be viable.

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Integrating a data enrichment tool like ZoomInfo can help bridge these gaps and create a targeted acquisition brief. Instead of making broad requests, you can make highly specific ones, such as “Fill the contact gaps at these three specific companies”. This creates a feedback loop where you use your dashboard to identify coverage gaps, send a targeted brief to your enrichment tool, and then refresh the dashboard to see a larger, more relevant audience to engage.

Build the business case for future investment

While this approach is an effective short-term solution, its primary strength lies in its strategic value. To secure investment, marketing teams must provide evidence of marketing’s potential impact. This method allows you to run pilots that build a compelling business case. 

By unlocking existing data, you can test a hypothesis in the real world. For instance, a team could hypothesize that cross-sell revenue can be increased by 15% by targeting owners of Product A with messaging about Product B. The BI dashboard can be used to build that precise segment, run the campaign, and measure the results. The outcome serves as concrete evidence of what marketing can achieve with a more unified view of data.  This offers a low-investment, high-impact way to demonstrate what is possible and secure the budget for more robust, long-term solutions.

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This hands-on approach to data also fosters a critical cultural shift. Many marketers are understandably wary or even scared of data. It can feel like a big, complicated thing that’s off-limits. This sandbox demystifies data and builds confidence.

It helps move teams away from “random acts of marketing” and encourages them to think like data scientists: forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, measuring the outcome, and iterating. This is a crucial muscle for marketing teams to build, especially as AI plays a larger role in analyzing data and automating these experimental loops.

The demand for personalized experiences won’t wait. Examine the tools you have, identify the business outcomes you need to drive, and begin integrating your data. The single customer view you’re waiting for might be closer than you think.