One Profile, Two Truths
A B2B software company maintains customer profiles built from CRM imports, web form submissions, and event registrations. The profile's 'job title' field is populated from three sources with different refresh cadences: CRM nightly, web forms on submission, and event lists quarterly. A sales ops manager reports that 18% of active profiles show a title that conflicts with the CRM's current value, and that the profile's 'company size' field is blank for 34% of records because it was only ever filled by the event import. Marketing is about to launch an executive-focused nurture track that targets profiles where title contains 'Director' or above. The CRM is designated the system of record for account and contact data, but no field-level precedence rules were ever documented, and the profile platform silently keeps the most recently written value.
1. Diagnose the root cause of the title conflicts and propose a field-level data governance fix.
Read the worked answer
The root cause is last-write-wins with no field-level precedence. Because the profile platform keeps the most recent write regardless of source, a quarterly event import or a self-submitted web form can overwrite a nightly CRM value. The 18% conflict rate is the visible symptom of an undocumented ownership model.
Fix:
- Assign a source of record per field, not per system. For title, CRM is authoritative (it is the declared system of record for contact data); web forms and event lists become candidate values.
- Implement precedence with timestamps and source rank, e.g., CRM nightly wins unless a web-form value is newer than the last CRM sync and passes validation; event data never overwrites CRM directly but flags a discrepancy for review.
- Add a conflict queue so mismatches are reconciled rather than silently resolved.
- Document the rules and monitor conflict rate as a data-quality KPI; a falling conflict rate is the success signal.
Without this, the executive nurture track will target on stale titles.
2. Marketing wants to launch the executive nurture track now. What is your recommendation, and how would you make the audience defensible?
Read the worked answer
Do not launch on the raw profile field. Targeting 'Director or above' on a field with an 18% conflict rate means roughly one in five targets may be mis-titled, and the company-size blank rate (34%) means any size-based suppression or personalization is unreliable.
Make the audience defensible:
- Build the segment from the authoritative source (CRM title) rather than the blended profile value, or require that the profile title and CRM title agree before inclusion.
- Quarantine conflicts: exclude the 18% mismatch records from the first wave, or route them to manual review, rather than guessing.
- Backfill company size from a firmographic enrichment source keyed on domain, and mark enriched values with provenance so they are distinguishable from verified ones.
- Pilot on the clean subset (agreement + non-blank size), measure engagement, then expand as reconciliation proceeds.
State the tradeoff explicitly: a smaller, cleaner audience now beats a larger audience that embarrasses the brand with wrong titles in executive messaging.