CDP Webinar Part 3: Questions our Audience care about

Our 1st multi-CDP Webinar covered questions to ask during your CDP RFP, however we also ran a Live Q&A session, which gave us further insight into what questions our audiences have and what insight would be helpful.

With the 2^nd CDP Webinar announced, I will continue answering these questions in a series of articles, as promised.

This time let’s look at the question on Standard CDP RFPTemplates & what templates to use for a CDP Vendor Selection – asked by afew webinar attendees.

CDP Institute vs CDP Vendors  

A CDP Institute RFP template is probably the closest thing to an industry standard we have. It’s a good starting point, but it will need to be adapted to fit the exact business requirements.

Many CDP vendors also offer their own templates - I am including a selection below.  These are good for comparison purposes but will likely skew to a particular set of functionalities due to their very nature.

As such, not one single vendor template should be used for an RFP.

Build Your Own

What I would typically recommend if combining several strong templates and then augmenting them with your own business requirements from key stakeholders.

This could be one of the most valuable exercises you complete:

·     giving perspective,

·     driving business understanding

·     and buy-in.

Not only will it give you a baseline of functionalities to expect, but also ensure you select a CDP that fits across functions.

It will also inform questions to ask and equip your Teams with the ability to further probe the eventual RFP responses you receive.

For example, if one CDP RFP template talks about asking granular questions on Real-time data – from ingestion to transformation &activation – and the other one does not – you probably want to ask the omitting vendor to clarify – if, indeed, real time is valuable to you.

Involve Procurement

You would then ideally add a layer driven by yourProcurement Team, who have ran similar vendor selections in the past.

This will ensure you capture the baseline questions ranging anywhere from the expected Compliance & Infosec to Commercial standards.  

From experience, the right Procurement Specialist can ask the right questions from the start and drive early commercial transparency.

Whereas this might seemingly slow the process down at the initial stages, it will likely be one of the key enablers to drastically reducethe time from selecting the preferred vendor to contract signing and go-live.

It will also reduce the chances of unpleasant surprises later in the process.  

Prioritise

And last but not least, you will want these questions weighted - future roadmap vision is great but will you place the same value on this vs. fitting with your other systems or the ability to un-merge user profiles if an error has occurred?

The likelihood is each business will answer this differently.

Therefore, the right product fit will rely heavily on configuring the RFP questions & process to unearth the platform that will truly provide what’s required and valued.

 CDP RFP Template Examples

 Lastly, as promised, I am including a selection of CDP RFP templates below:

·     CDP Institute

·     Tealium

·     Treasure Data

·     Acquia

·     Twilio Segment

Combining several templates is the method I have personally used when selecting a CDP client side and the method I use at Loop Horizon -for the very reason that I believe this produces the optimal outcome for the business.  

If you want to find our more, or you are building your own RFP and want to discuss what else to include, please do get in touch.

And in the meantime, look out for our next webinar and register here!