Building a Marketing Data Foundation from Scratch
Designed and led the implementation of a unified marketing data layer for a mid-market SaaS company — enabling attribution, lifecycle reporting, and reliable segmentation for the first time.
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.
Director of Marketing Technology. 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 — and 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, reducing duplicates by 64%
- First reliable multi-touch attribution model deployed within 90 days
- Lifecycle segmentation supporting 6 distinct audience clusters
- Marketing reporting moved from manual quarterly exports to automated weekly summaries
- Reduced time-to-insight for campaign performance from 3 days to 4 hours
- Data taxonomy documentation
- Vendor evaluation scorecard
- Governance model overview
- Stakeholder alignment deck