Don’t Skip Discovery: How to De-Risk Your CDP Investment – Associate Director, Solutions Consulting — Amanda Grier
Thursday, June 5, 2025
Don’t Skip Discovery: How to De-Risk Your CDP Investment
By Amanda Grier — Associate Director, Solutions Consulting
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) like Adobe Real-Time CDP have the power to transform how businesses unify, activate, and govern their data—but this transformation doesn’t start with the platform; it starts with strategy, data readiness, and governance.
As organizations consider investing in CDPs, one of the smartest moves they can make is investing first in a strategic discovery phase. Think of it as the blueprint before the build. It’s where assumptions get tested, risks get surfaced, and future-state visions start to take shape.
Why Discovery Matters
At Rightpoint, we often see organizations eager to unlock the potential of Adobe RT-CDP only to realize their foundational data infrastructure isn’t ready. While CDPs promise transformational results, achieving ROI depends on readiness. According to the CDP Institute, organizations that prioritize a discovery phase see time-to-value improve by up to 2.5x, compared to those that rush into implementation without a strategic foundation (CDP Institute, 2023). Too often, implementation timelines get derailed by unseen data issues—fragmentation across systems, unclear governance, inconsistent identifiers, or compliance blind spots.
A thoughtful discovery phase helps mitigate these risks by:
Assessing Data Readiness: Understanding whether your current data can support the use cases you want to activate.
Uncovering Silos: Identifying where customer data lives and how it can be unified for profile building and personalization.
Ensuring Governance & Compliance: Reviewing how existing policies align with privacy regulations and how the CDP can support better enforcement.
Defining an MVP Roadmap: Aligning on achievable, high-impact use cases that deliver quick wins and long-term value.
How Discovery Accelerates Value
Too often, CDP implementations stall because organizations underestimate the complexity of their own data ecosystems. In fact, 40% of CDP rollouts underperform due to unresolved data issues that surface only after implementation begins (Gartner, 2022). Investing in a data readiness discovery phase is how we mitigate that risk—by turning unknowns into knowns and establishing a clear, actionable path forward.
By investing in CDP readiness, clients benefit from:
Faster time to activation: By validating data pipelines, sources, and structure up front, data ingestion is more streamlined.
Fewer rework cycles: Discovery helps you build it right the first time. You reduce the risk of needing to reconfigure identity models, reengineer governance rules, or restructure data schemas mid-project.
Strategic alignment across teams: The discovery phase brings IT, marketing, legal, and analytics teams to the table early, ensuring business needs and technical capabilities are aligned from the start.
A phased MVP approach: With clear use cases prioritized by impact and feasibility, your organization can demonstrate early wins that build momentum and support for broader CDP adoption.
Stronger governance: By reviewing your current data privacy practices and aligning them with frameworks like GDPR and CCPA, discovery ensures that governance is embedded into your CDP from day one—not added later as an afterthought.
Who Benefits Most?
Discovery isn’t just for organizations with complex data ecosystems—it’s for any business that wants to set their CDP implementation up for long-term success.
Discovery phases are especially critical for:
Organizations with siloed or legacy data systems: Discovery helps map how to integrate disconnected sources, standardize schemas, and create a unified profile strategy.
Teams new to data governance or compliance workflows: It’s a chance to build stronger privacy practices into the foundation of your CDP rather than retrofitting them later.
Companies moving from campaign-centric to customer-centric models: CDPs enable this transformation, but only if the data strategy and business alignment are there to support it.
Enterprises planning cross-brand or multi-region activations: Discovery can identify where centralized vs. federated strategies work best, and how to balance regional compliance and data residency needs.
Organizations with failed or stalled CDP initiatives: A discovery phase can serve as a reset—bringing focus, clarity, and a practical roadmap for relaunch.
Don’t View Discovery as Optional
CDPs are deeply strategic, data-driven platforms that touch nearly every corner of the business. Investing in a discovery phase isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s a foundational step that separates implementation success stories from failures. It gives an opportunity to align stakeholders, evaluate data readiness, and create a roadmap based on achievable goals, reducing investment risks, accelerating activation, and ensuring your CDP is not only deployed but also effective.
Whether you're starting fresh or restarting after a poor implementation, discovery isn’t optional. It’s your best chance to ensure your CDP becomes a powerful, scalable engine for personalized customer experiences.
If you’re considering Adobe RT-CDP or struggling to scale your data efforts, let’s talk about how we can help you take the right first step.
