CMOs are under immense pressure to deliver measurable results, align cross-functional teams and adapt to constant market shifts. Yet, dealing with fragmented and siloed data remains a critical roadblock.
Imagine this: you’re preparing an annual strategy review, but justifying increased ad spend is a struggle because marketing metrics and sales data don’t align. This disconnect creates doubts among stakeholders, stalling decisions and threatening campaign budgets.
These challenges are not unusual. Research from Gartner reveals that bad data costs companies $12.9 million annually (per company) — a staggering number that includes missed growth opportunities and wasted investments. For CMOs, the stakes are even higher. Decisions based on incomplete or inconsistent data not only hinder day-to-day operations but also risk undermining their credibility in the C-suite.
This is where a unified marketing data hub becomes essential. By centralizing data into a single source of truth, CMOs can ensure alignment across teams, confidently make real-time decisions and deliver on the metrics that matter most to the business.
Why are data silos problematic?
Fragmented data is a major obstacle for CMOs because you don’t have the clarity required for strategic decisions, such as budgeting, marketing positioning and long-term planning. Data silos occur when different teams or departments manage information in isolation with separate tools or systems. This leads to inconsistent records, poor data quality and delays in getting the insights you need to make decisions.
When customer data is scattered across silos, aligning marketing with broader business goals becomes nearly impossible. For example, if the sales team tracks leads in one system and marketing tracks campaign conversions in another, how can you connect your efforts to revenue growth? How can you prove marketing’s value to your CFO without showing which sales were directly driven by your work? You can’t. That’s the CMO’s dilemma.
These inefficiencies come with real costs. Your team wastes hours manually piecing together inaccurate data in spreadsheets. Delayed or unreliable insights lead to missed opportunities, and poor data quality erodes your credibility with the C-suite. Without trust in the data, it’s harder to secure budgets or demonstrate marketing’s impact on your institutional objectives.
Limitations caused by data silos in marketing
Unlike traditional data warehouses or “data lakes” developed decades ago for IT teams to centralize business data, marketing data presents unique challenges. It’s dynamic, diverse and often stored across multiple platforms, making it notoriously difficult to centralize.
As a result, pulling together the insights you need to make agile, data-driven decisions is tricky. Most CMOs struggle to get the insights they need or feel uncertain about the data they have on hand. One survey of North American CMOs found that only 28% have substantial confidence in their data, and just 8% believe they can quickly transform data into useful insights. Two-thirds of the CMOs surveyed named siloed data as their biggest obstacle.
Centralizing data requires a dedicated data hub that has been purpose-built for marketing.
Centralizing marketing data is about more than just gathering and storing information in one place. We’re not talking about a data lake to pool metrics. Unifying actionable insights is the goal here. Without a marketing-specific hub, you and your team face inconsistent metrics and gaps in analysis, making costly mistakes more likely. Further limitations include:
An obscured view
Fragmented data leaves you guessing instead of knowing, missing key insights and opportunities. When information is siloed, decision-making slows down and time is wasted. You also lose clear visibility into customer behavior, campaign performance and market trends, all things you need when presenting results to your C-suite.
Take budgeting as an example. Creating a report to link costs to revenue shouldn’t require endless back-and-forth emails to reconcile mismatched figures between finance, sales and operations. Yet, for many CMOs, this is the reality.
If you don’t have all this information aggregated in a central dashboard, you are stuck piecing it together manually. These delays don’t just waste time, they weaken your ability to defend decisions and secure the budget you need to hit institutional goals.
Operating with siloed data is like driving with a foggy windshield. You are making guesses instead of informed decisions, leaving your strategy vulnerable and your business at risk.
Without a clear and reliable way to manage data, you are forced into costly gambles, making it harder to stay ahead and seize opportunities or tie your performance to revenue lift.
Inconsistent data
Data silos create inconsistency, making it difficult for teams to align. For example, consider the process of justifying your marketing spend. If your marketing team uses one data set to measure campaign performance, while finance relies on another to calculate revenue impact, you end up with conflicting numbers that won’t reconcile. This creates confusion and erodes confidence in your marketing efforts.
These disconnects also undermine collaboration, resulting in fragmented strategies that fail to deliver the cohesive and measurable outcomes expected of a strategic and data-informed CMO.
As a leader, you need a unified view of accurate, accessible and actionable data. Breaking down silos and standardizing how data is managed across the organization allows you to build trust in your insights and align the expectations of the C-suite with your performance and leadership.
Fragmented data
Fragmented data slows you down and keeps you from making the progress you need to grow. Without a clear view of your customers, it’s hard to deliver the kind of personalized experiences they expect. Instead of creating strategies that truly connect, you end up with campaigns that feel generic and miss the mark.
AI and machine learning could help you take things further, but they rely on clean, consistent data. When your data is scattered or incomplete, these tools can’t do their job. That means fewer insights, missed opportunities and campaigns that don’t perform as well as they could.
The solution is to bring your data together in one place. This helps teams work better together and gives everyone access to the same reliable information. With that foundation, you can focus on creating smarter strategies, adapting quickly when things change and delivering results that move the business forward.
2 examples of better data management in action
Let’s look at what happens when marketing leaders decide to centralize their data.
Sephora
Sephora was struggling with fragmented data across its European marketing teams, making reporting a hassle and driving up costs. By teaming up with Hanalytics and a data integration platform, they centralized data management and cut data warehouse costs by 75%.
With data spread across marketing teams all over Europe, Sephora sought a central hub for insights.
Now, both central and local teams can access the same data, making reporting easier and decision-making faster. It’s a win that shows how breaking down silos can transform efficiency and drive results.
Broadhead
Broadhead, a full-service marketing agency, was dealing with data silos that made it tough to connect the dots and show their full impact. When Dan Mandle joined as SVP of Data Science, he saw the need for change.
With data silos hindering real insights, Broadhead invested in centralizing their reporting.
By unifying their data, Broadhead cut management costs by 50% and scaled client onboarding without needing more hires. This shift not only streamlined operations but also opened the door to offering new services like marketing mix modeling, which not only helps them with their own marketing measurement but adds a valuable new service for their clients.
Key questions CMOs should ask about their data strategy
When it comes to assessing your existing data strategy, ask these questions to identify gaps:
1. Is our data centralized and accessible?
Can teams across sales, marketing and finance access a single source of truth, or are insights scattered across platforms?
Can you and your CFO check a shared dashboard that tracks co-authored KPIs, such as costs versus revenue lift, in real time?
Are performance insights tied to business objectives like revenue growth and customer retention?
2. How accurate and up-to-date is our data?
Are we relying on clean, real-time data? Or are inconsistencies affecting decisions? Can we identify data silos to prevent them from recurring?
3. Do we have full visibility into the customer journey?
Can we track interactions across all channels and touchpoints to inform strategies and measure marketing efficiency?
This kind of interrogation of your data will help you create a centralized view of marketing’s contribution to larger business objectives and deepen your understanding of how marketing performance impacts your company’s strategic growth.
Co-authored metrics CMOs should prioritize when centralizing data
There are three key metrics that will help align your results with your CFO’s expectations as you build a more accountable and transparent view of marketing’s contribution to revenue.
1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Why it matters: CAC measures how efficiently you’re acquiring new customers and directly impacts profitability.
What to ask: Are we tracking CAC accurately across all channels, and is our centralized data helping identify the most cost-effective campaigns?
2. Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)
Why it matters: MER, the ratio of total revenue to total marketing spend, provides a high-level view of marketing’s overall effectiveness.
What to ask: Does our data platform give us a clear and real-time picture of revenue generated versus marketing spend to streamline budget review meetings with the C-suite?
3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Why it matters: CLV shows the total value a customer brings over their relationship with your business, helping prioritize high-value segments.
What to ask: Can our centralized data help connect customer behaviors to CLV? Are we using this insight to optimize retention and resource allocation?
These three metrics will likely be involved in your collaborative discussions with your CFO. Keep them in mind as you evaluate how your data should be centralized.
3 steps to break down data silos
So, what do you need to be able to make quick decisions based on reliable data? Here’s how to set your foundation for a more data-informed 2025:
1. Centralize your data with a tool that’s focused on marketing
Stop jumping between tools and bring your marketing data into one place. Consolidate information from your CRM, social platforms, e-commerce systems and more into a centralized marketing intelligence tool.
While traditional data warehouses help centralize business data, marketing-specific solutions like Funnel offer real-time insights tailored to CMOs’ needs.
This makes accessing campaign results, customer insights and analytics faster and more efficient. A centralized hub provides real-time, consistent metrics, reducing confusion and delays caused by conflicting data.
2. Leverage advanced integration technologies
Use an ETL tool to automate data integration from your CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce, then export and report in your C-suite’s preferred BI platform.
ETL tools pull data from various sources, standardize it into a consistent format and move the processed data into a destination system like a cloud data warehouse or data lake. As a result, you get more seamless communication across your tech stack, which supports real-time updates, reduces redundancies and simplifies data analysis.
ETL tools make consolidating data more efficient.
3. Align with other teams around this centralized hub
Co-author your KPIs with your CFO. Then, key growth metrics like CAC and CLV will become part of your day-to-day collaborations with your C-suite.
Schedule regular cross-functional meetings to review campaign performance, sales progress and customer satisfaction using shared dashboards that are already tracking your KPIs in real time.
Clear data governance policies for calculating and reporting KPIs like these help create consistency, and assigning a data steward to keep on top of dashboards and API management can improve how data is aggregated and used across departments.
These three steps can take you from a marketing leader to a fully-armed growth strategist. By centralizing marketing data, using an ETL tool to make data integration efficient and making cross-team collaboration ongoing, you’ll have the insights you need to help your organization build a strong foundation for smarter, more collaborative decision-making that truly moves your business forward.
Turn siloed data into valuable insights that drive growth
A unified marketing intelligence tool helps teams adapt to market demands, scale campaigns effectively and turn insights into growth. Siloed data is costing you time, credibility and revenue. Regain control with a centralized data hub and let Funnel help you break down those silos.