What is Data Orchestration and what does it mean?

Data orchestration is the process of unifying customer data across multiple storage locations to then analyze, clean, standardize, enrich and route individual lead, contact and account records at scale. Streamlining and automating data-driven processes and tasks that usually require substantial manual effort, sophisticated code, and countless spreadsheets.

Data Orchestration is typically used by sales and marketing operations teams to prepare large volumes of customer data to make informed data-driven decisions, take-action and improve revenue performance and productivity.

The core components of a modern data orchestration strategy include:

• Dedupe incoming leads to prevent duplicates from wreaking havoc among your sales and marketing teams.
• Normalize data values to a standard taxonomy (i.e. New York = NY) to ensure the format of incoming data complies with your routing and external systems.
• Segment your data into clear buyer personas, sales territories, scores, and more (Job Role, Industry, Territory, etc) to enable easy territory planning & assignment.
• Match Leads-to-Accounts to make account-based marketing a possibility by showing lead data in the context of prospect accounts.
• Enrich critical data points on incoming leads such as job title and company size to ensure go-to-market teams have the information they need.
• Score using any combination of data points to define scoring models for leads and accounts.
• Route leads, contact and accounts and other CRM objects automatically, to the correct place, at the right time.
• Book meetings automatically to convert leads into qualified conversations and accelerate the revenue engine.

What is the purpose of Data Orchestration?

The purpose of Data Orchestration is to increase sales and marketing productivity by quickly transforming raw data into actionable data-driven insights that help enable revenue operations (RevOps) and go-to-market teams to achieve their goals.

It is necessary to have systems in place that can “connect-the-dots,” to effectively manage data at scale so that it is clean and actionable.

Organized

Data Orchestration takes data from multiple storage locations, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce, Marketing Automation Platforms (Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua) and even data warehouses, data lakes and CDPs like Snowflake. Data Orchestration systems connect to these data storage locations through API connections, unifying data into one source of truth across all systems.

Clean

Data Orchestration systems will map to specific fields to ensure that each record, in every field, in all systems have the same information in place. Data Orchestration platforms like RingLead will ensure that duplicates are identified and merged, fields are normalized so that it is consistent with the same information. Making sure that items like job titles and contact information all use a standardized consistent format.

Actionable

Actionable data drives revenue. Knowing who marketing and sales teams are trying to reach, with the correct information at the right time is what drives productivity and performance. Enriched data with the latest information, will help marketing and sales teams uncover new opportunities within their own database by identifying, prioritizing and qualifying ideal contact and account profiles.

Why Is Data Orchestration Important?

The complexity of the data ecosystem is constantly evolving due to the rise of data-driven applications like Snowflake, Salesforce, and Marketing Automation Platforms.

Companies are ingesting massive volumes of data daily, and it is imperative to have a system of processes and workflows in place to ensure that businesses can consume data, as opposed to letting it consume the business. Any mid-market and enterprise company in today’s market can attest to the complexities involved in managing customer data at scale. From wrangling duplicates and incomplete or missing contact information, to making sure sales teams are reaching out to the right prospects at the right time.

Data Orchestration systems like RingLead, abstract data across multiple storage locations, unifying all that data in real-time to deliver complete, normalized and enriched data that is ready for marketing and sales outreach.

How can Data Orchestration Help Business?

Corporate performance expectations compel organizations to find novel ways to maximize profitability. In response, go-to-market teams work together to identify market opportunities, solve business problems, and generate revenues—all while upholding brand reputation. Data orchestration technology is engineered to facilitate these efforts at scale. It's true: necessity is the mother of invention.

Many of the benefits realized through data orchestration are the same kind of benefits that team leaders often seek to advance their business:

Accurate Customer Profiling: Clean, consistent, complete data enables accurate and usable segmentation by vertical, persona, and any mix of other criteria unique to your business.

True 360-Degree View of the Customer: Routing all pertinent data, from new leads to buyer behaviors and other data unique to your business, finally creates that 360-degree view of the customer you've wanted.

Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDD): Every part of the go-to-market revenue engine has all the data they need to make smart business choices.

Marketing Productivity: Marketers have the information they need to create targeted campaigns, sales enablement tools, and tailored messaging that resonates with the target audience.

Account-Based Strategies: Sales and marketing teams have all the information they need to effectively execute targeted sales sequences and nurture campaigns, based on accurate customer profiles.

Sales Effectiveness: Personalized messaging and perfectly timed sales sequences resonate with prospects, encouraging more campaign responses that turn into close-won opportunities.

Better Conversion Rates: Inbound lead gen improves, more qualified meetings occur, and prospects move through the buyer journey faster.

Sales & Marketing Alignment: GTM teams collaborate well together in a trusted CRM that is not a burden, but a system of insight that helps each team achieve mutual goals.

Reliable Forecasting: Weighted pipeline, quota, trend, and sales forecasts are trustworthy because the opportunity and account data that feeds them is accurate.

Brand & Reputation Protection: Inbound lead response is faster, outbound outreach is coordinated, email unsubscribes and complaints decrease, and the customer experience improves across the entire lifecycle.

Industry & Government Compliance: Risk of hefty fines is reduced because all connected systems can be configured to conform to data and privacy regulations.

Capitalization of the Total Addressable Market (TAM): Identify expansion opportunities, verticalize the business into new markets, and deploy multiple GTM programs.

Cost Savings: Eliminate the need to pay for multiple point solutions, reduce MAP storage costs, and create time-saving efficiencies for all GTM teams without having to hire more full-time employees.

Revenue Gains: Increased marketing productivity and improved sales effectiveness manifests as increased deal size and more closed-won business.

ROI Attribution: High-quality data and automated workflows enable more accurate campaign attribution and ROI reporting.

Profitability: Realize all the cost-saving and revenue-generating benefits, year after year.

Conclusion

Data Orchestration is a multifaceted process that helps sales and marketing ops teams facilitate data-driven decision making at scale. Components of a successful data orchestration strategy include deduplication, normalization, segmentation, and more. In our next blog post, we’ll take a closer look at 8 core data orchestration components.

The benefits of data orchestration are many. They include a 360-degree view of your customer, sales-marketing alignment, and reliable sales forecasting, among others.Implement a data orchestration strategy sooner than later to reap these growth-promoting benefits.