Siloed data is holding go-to-market teams back, thinks Dorian Kendal. The CMO at Netlify actually cut his teeth in operations and data, taking his skills to the likes of Google and Twitter.

When a data team sits separately from marketing or sales, they cannot be expected to sense check the data based on an understanding of the campaign or initiative, says Kendal, they’ll never stumble upon data that could reveal a growth opportunity, and they are simply less familiar with the goals of the team.

Take, for example, something as simple as campaign ROI. As a marketer, you’ll have a loose understanding of whether a campaign was successful or not, and if the data says otherwise, you’ll be able to look at the campaign setup, the platforms, the audiences, and other variables, to see why the data is not as expected. A siloed data team will not instinctively know to do this.

“You typically used to see a data team that was built of data engineers and pipeline engineers and data scientists, and people have traditionally not thought that that is a marketing function. But when you get into the data science that really contributes to operational metrics, it just becomes more and more important that it's part of marketing.” Kendal shared.

How to get buy-in from your leadership team

Before you can even start to think about embedding a data team or individual in a marketing department, you need to get very specific about what exactly it is you are trying to achieve.

“The word data in itself has become very amorphous. When you just say data — what does that actually mean? When you go to leadership teams and you talk to them and say, ‘Hey, I need data to be part of marketing.’ It's hard for them to settle on that.

“One of the ways marketers can convince leadership that data should sit embedded as part of the team, is to really try to determine the questions you're trying to answer. If you're really clear and leadership understands the objectives based on questions you're trying to answer, it helps to make the case against a centralized approach.”

The future of data-driven marketing

Marketers have made great strides with data. Where once flying blind was the norm, we are now armed with so much data that the problem has become finding a way to operationalize it all with the resources available to us.

Thankfully, there is now so much demand for solutions, that we’re well on our way to true democratization of data, says Dorian. “If you look back to 15, 20 years ago, the amount of data we have now is exponentially larger.”