Building a Marketing Data Foundation from Scratch

The company had grown through acquisition and organic expansion, leaving a fragmented stack: three CRMs, two MAPs and no single source of truth for pipeline data. The marketing team was running campaigns against unreliable lists and reporting manually every quarter.

Senior Marketing Technology Manager. I scoped the project, selected vendors, led the technical implementation and owned the stakeholder communication from marketing through finance.

Without reliable data, the marketing team could not defend spend, demonstrate pipeline influence or segment customers at scale. Leadership wanted attribution. The team needed a foundation. Those are different problems. Confusing them had already cost the company a failed CDP rollout.

I separated the project into two phases: (1) a data clean-up and taxonomy sprint to establish canonical definitions across systems, and (2) a platform implementation that connected the MAP, CRM and data warehouse. I introduced a lightweight governance model, not a full-blown CoE, that gave the team ownership without creating overhead.

• → Unified contact records across three CRMs into a single deduplicated view
• → First reliable multi-touch attribution model the company had
• → Lifecycle segmentation built on canonical definitions instead of ad hoc lists
• → Marketing reporting moved from manual exports to automated recurring summaries
• → Cut time-to-insight on campaign performance from days to hours

• – Data taxonomy documentation
• – Vendor evaluation scorecard
• – Governance model overview
• – Stakeholder alignment deck