3 Essential Success Criteria for a New CDP
Last updated July 23, 2025Deciding it’s time to replace or purchase a new customer data platform (CDP) is a significant undertaking. It requires careful consideration of current challenges, future goals, and a thorough evaluation of available solutions.
But deciding to replace your CDP isn’t the end; you’re just getting started. Our new guide, Replacing Your CDP, co-authored with CDP Institute Founder and CEO David Raab, answers the questions you need answered: How do you go about selecting a new CDP? What criteria is important to consider and who should be involved in the process?
Defining success requirements for a CDP upgrade is the topic of this blog. Let’s get into it.
Assembling the CDP selection team
CDP selection is a collaborative process, and you need to select the right mix of roles and their responsibilities for the buying committee. The roles you need come from different departments, such as marketing, IT, customer experience, security, and finance and procurement, among others.
If you’ve been through a CDP evaluation process before, you would already have a selection team identified. This is a good time to re-evaluate the buying team structure, not because they made a mistake but because your needs may have evolved since that initial CDP selection.
For example, you are expanding globally to new markets and want to bring in a team member(s) that can help define the CDP requirements needed in those regions. You may also have implemented new tools that the CDP will need to integrate with, so you’ll want someone on the team that uses that technology and will understand how the two need to work together.
Defining your CDP requirements
With your buying committee in place, the work can start. There are many things you need to consider before selecting a new CDP. They fall into three broad categories: system, organizational, and vendor requirements.
Evaluating essential system capabilities
System requirements focus on the features the CDP must provide, including:
- Technical functions: These functions are used by the technical team and include data ingestion, identity management, data modeling, and transformations.
- Business functions: Business users, including marketing teams, also have unique requirements, such as user interfaces for data analysis, segmentation, and predictive modeling. Functionality to support data activation may also be required.
- Other essential capabilities include usability, support staff requirements, and required skills to manage and use the CDP.
While you may have developed these requirements for your incumbent CDP, they have likely changed over time. And, with first-hand experience using a CDP within your organization, you have likely identified some capabilities to prioritize. For instance, if CDP adoption is lacking among your marketing team, it could be a sign that the user interface and product complexity was a barrier. Use that knowledge to inform requirements for your CDP upgrade.
Speaking of requirements, you could write a list of them and hope you identify everything you need. But here’s a better approach – define your use cases. There may be hundreds of use cases depending on your organization and situation. The key is to select the use cases most important to your business and map them out, listing the system and business requirements.
Here are a couple of examples:
- Increase revenue per customer: The purpose of this use case is to leverage existing VIP customer behaviors and attributes to find and acquire incremental VIP customers from the existing customer base.
- Reduce customer churn: This use case looks at how to deal with customers who stop engaging or cancel subscriptions by infusing AI to look at engagement patterns, predict churn risk, and automate retention offers or loyalty rewards.
Not all CDPs provide the same capabilities or work the same way, so you need to define exactly what you expect the CDP to do. The good news is Treasure Data CDP is a blank canvas. It can support almost anything you are trying to do as a business. To harness that potential, you must paint a clear picture of each use case and why it’s needed.
Assessing CDP vendor requirements
Having a clear understanding of the vendor requires documenting another set of requirements. You want a vendor that will be a good partner and has a lot of expertise in your industry. Some things to look for include their financial stability, pricing and contract terms, and what they provide for training and support.
Also, remember you are looking at pricing and contract terms for your current operations, but these will change over time as your business grows or more groups start using the CDP, so understand how these things will change as your situation changes.
When determining how to choose your next CDP, make sure to explore all the resources newly available since your last search, including evaluations from the top analyst firms, fresh reviews from customers on sites like G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, and more. Finally, remember to ask your shortlist of vendors to do a proof of concept (POC) so you can put their claims to the test.
Addressing internal organizational needs
The last category of requirements is organizational in nature and can’t be overlooked. These requirements are not directly related to the CDP upgrade but to organizational challenges you may have faced with your old CDP that you need to address with the new one.
For example, how will you address change management or create cross-departmental cooperation? Will the CDP support your activation systems? All your source data?
As part of the selection process, identify potential organizational challenges and develop a plan to address them. The tool you select will impact these requirements and vice versa.
You can also learn from companies with successful CDP implementations. Check out our interviews with Condé Nast and Constellation Brands to get insights into how different teams structure their teams and maximize value from customer data.
Choosing the right CDP is foundational for future success
Implementing a new or replacement CDP is a big decision that impacts every aspect of your business. You need to ensure you have identified all the key success requirements to look for as you go through the selection process. By documenting your key use cases, you can clearly define the system, vendor, and operational requirements that the new CDP must support.
There’s one other thing you need from your new CDP – flexibility. Your requirements will change as you run your business. The CDP must be able to adapt to these changes without significant rework. Without this flexibility, you may find yourself in the same position of needing to select another new CDP sooner than you want.
Your next steps? Map out your migration plan and check out Treasure Data’s CDP Trade-Up program to see how Treasure Data can help you migrate more quickly and easily while reducing your cost burden for switching
