Building a Customer Data Source of Truth - Ryan Vong

Data is the raw material we work with in marketing. You can come up amazing campaign ideas. You can even build them out. But if your data is junk, everything falls apart. Today's guest spent a decade building Digital Pi, a top marketing automation agency, and is now making a pivot to customer data ops.

We chat about the data problems facing revenue teams, the issues with traditional data warehouse approaches, and why Syncari is his data platform of choice.

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About Today's Guest

Ryan Vong is a marketing technology leader with over 20 years experience. He was the founder and CEO of Digital Pi, a global marketing automation agency acquired by Merkle Inc. in 2020. In 2023, he founded Helix CXM, an agency providing data operations for revenue teams.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvong/

Key Topics

[00:00] - Introduction
[00:45] - Evolution of marketing operations over the last decade.
[03:08] - Marketing ops vs. sales ops. Need for marketing operations to become more strategic. Campaign execution becoming commoditized. Limits on the size of MOPS teams.
[05:59] -Marketing operations as a force for accountability, evaluating effectiveness. Approaches and challenges in interpreting the customer journey. Not all the data is there.
[08:24] - Ryan's pivot to customer data ops and founding CXM. The pains he saw that led him in this direction. How marketing automation was limited by dirty data. Helix is data operations for the revenue team. AI requires clean data to function properly.
[13:02] - Data operations involves both technical and process / strategy components. How Ryan aims to address those. Three phases of data - as a utility, as an enabler, as a driver. Data as a utility is the first priority.
[14:49] - Perspective on traditional data warehouse/lake. Centralized system is needed, but with current approach it's too slow. Everything is outdated by the time it's ready.
[18:25] - Deep dive into Syncari, why Ryan selected it, what makes it unique. Single source of truth vs. distributed truth. Ability for users to work where they are already comfortable. Having a data store incorporated into the tool. Similarity to how the Marketo/Salesforce sync works. Ability to revert to previous state.
[24:02] - Ownership of the customer data engine within the organization. Natural home is within revenue ops teams. Collaboration with IT department.
[25:36] - Structure of a data ops engagement. Ability to preview data before turning the system on. Importance of speed/agility. Build vs. run components of the engagement. Data monitoring - similar to home security monitoring.
[29:29] - Lessons learned and plans for taking the agency founder's journey a second time.