We need to shift our focus from prospects to customers. Why? Because we're no longer in the 'growth at all costs' phase. SaaS companies face more competition than ever. Concentrating only on prospects is expensive and won't sustain our revenue growth. You'll hit the customer acquisition cost (CAC) ceiling quickly. It's time to focus on expansion revenue.

Marketing growth is coming from customers. Revenue from upselling, cross-selling, and boosting customer lifetime value can be a significant growth driver.

When dealing with prospects, we rely on data such as website activity, CRM information, and enrichment details to effectively market to them. However, engaging with customers and users requires a completely different data set, primarily centered around product data.

Understanding and leveraging product data is essential for creating effective campaigns, improving user engagement, and driving business growth.

When you go to your Engineering, Product, or Data and ask for access to product activity events, two things can happen.

1. You get all that you need and get started right away on building a product-led marketing motion.
2. This is a more likely scenario. You put forward your case about using product data for marketing more effectively but, you’ll be met with some objections.

Here are some of the most common sticking points between Product and Marketing and how you can handle them.

Objection #1: Data Security Concerns

The fear of data breaches can lead to resistance against providing the necessary access to Marketing. Product and data teams are worried about the potential for data leaks when providing other teams with access to sensitive product data. These concerns are valid because the data warehouse has user data, financial records, or proprietary business information.

Here’s how you can address this:

• Develop a Data Access Proposal: Work with the product and data teams to create a clear and detailed proposal outlining the specific data needed, what tables marketing is connecting to, and the intended use. This can help reassure teams that data will be used responsibly. Oftentimes security teams will assume that “data warehouse access” is for marketing to have full fidelity of everything in the data warehouse and can become at ease when understanding marketing is just accessing a portion of the data.
• You can also discuss pushing data to a separate, isolated data warehouse instance that Marketing has access to.
• Some data warehouses like Snowflake have come with data-sharing capabilities to create a secure data-sharing environment. Snowflake allows you to share data securely without duplicating it. This ensures that marketing can access up-to-date data without compromising the security of the main data warehouse.

💡Tip: The product or data team may offer access to only the tables containing anonymized user interaction data, hashed email addresses, and campaign performance metrics for easier execution without compromising security. But, this will defeat the purpose of the whole exercise. Reiterate the intended access to raw and granular data.

Objection #2: Handling Huge Volumes of Data or High Sync Frequency (Costs, basically)

Increasing the frequency of data syncs to accommodate marketing requirements can strain existing infrastructure. Frequent data syncs can lead to performance issues, increased server loads, and increased costs. This technical challenge can deter engineering teams from supporting more frequent data access for marketing.

Here’s how you can address these objections:

• Explain the Business Impact: Make the product or data team understand the business impact of choosing delayed data sync. Explain that when product data drives the company’s GTM, real-time triggers to marketing automation make a huge difference. For example, Sales has higher chances of closing deals when alerted timely on a user’s activity rather than when they have to work off of stale data.
  
  Delayed data sync might save some bucks but the benefits of real-time data sync outweigh these costs.

• Prioritize Data Needs and Batching Syncs: Identify the most critical data points and events needed for marketing campaigns and prioritize those.
  
  Work with data teams to find a balance between real-time and batch data processing. Marketing use cases can still work with periodic but more frequent data syncs that don't strain the system.
  
  Suggest grouping similar data points together and syncing them in batches to improve efficiency and reduce the frequency of individual data syncs. This approach can help manage server load more effectively.
  
  For example: Real-time data for critical user actions (like account creation or purchase completions) can be prioritized, while other engagement metrics can be synced in regular batches.

• Incremental Updates: Explore together the option of incremental updates to sync only new or changed data, rather than syncing the entire dataset each time. This can significantly reduce the volume of data being processed.

💡Tip: While real-time sync of all product event data for Marketing is a highly unlikely scenario, you can always negotiate for a balance between real-time and a few days old data. Suggest a sync frequency that meets marketing needs while being feasible for the data infrastructure.

We’ve interviewed a lot of companies that settled for a 6-hour sync frequency to strike a balance between timely data and system capacity.

Objection #3: Complexities in Integrating with Marketing Systems

Engineering teams might highlight the complexity of integrating product event data with existing marketing systems. Here’s how you can address it:

• Modern Marketing Automation Tools: Discuss the capabilities of modern APIs and integration tools that simplify data sharing and reduce complexity. Highlight any existing integrations or tools that can facilitate the process. For example, Inflection.io is a marketing automation platform that can directly integrate with all popular data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and CDPs (like Segment).
  
  Utilize vendor or consultant support if needed to assist with integration complexities or provide expertise in data management and integration best practices.

• Incremental Progress: Propose a phased approach to integration rather than a big-bang approach. Start with smaller, manageable projects or proofs of concept to demonstrate feasibility and benefits.
• Resource Allocation: Justify your request for allocating valuable engineering resources for integration and other tasks by educating all stakeholders on the value of sharing product event data for marketing insights.
  
  Providing access to product event data for marketing purposes can actually benefit product development indirectly. For instance, insights gained from marketing analyses can inform product decisions and user experience enhancements. Foster open communication to address concerns.

Objection #4: Ego

Yes, it’s a real thing!

The Product is running some of the marketing comms triggered off of product activity and maybe is not too happy with marketing wandering their turf.

Here are some tips on how to work with that.

1. Sit down with the product team and educate them about what you're trying to do. Understand their objections and share that you are looking to achieve common objectives.
2. Make a list and like what communications are going to be owned by Product vs Marketing.
3. Make a list of goals that Product and Marketing align on. The teams can own some goals separately and some together. For example, product engagement metrics can be the product team's, and completing onboarding can be a Marketing goal.
4. Request and get access to the data required for your goals.

Educate the Product, Data, and Engineering about what you’re trying to do and listen to their objections. Propose possible solutions that everyone can come to terms with. Many of the objections can be discussed and negotiated to reach an understanding that’s beneficial for the product and business goals.

💡Tip: If you still see resistance to change, you can even propose to start small. Suggest implementing a pilot program of sorts to test out the impact. This can provide data and engineering teams with concrete insights into what is feasible without compromising performance. And, in the absolute worst case where you’re completely shut out, you might want to go to a higher-up to escalate the case.

Wrapping It Up

When requesting product data from other teams, expect objections about security, costs, technical issues, and more. Address these with clear proposals, real-time data benefits, and modern tools. Educate the product or data team about the bottom-line impact of having product activity data in real-time available for marketing. The potential deal closure chances outweigh the costs of bringing in product data into marketing automation.

If you want to use your product data and data warehouse to boost pipeline, product adoption, and revenue, check out Inflection.io. It's a marketing automation platform that simplifies prospect and customer communications, streamlines workflows, improves customer experience, is easier to manage, and more affordable. Request a demo.