Ahead of Snowflake World Tour, Paul McCord, Alliances Director at Zeotap and Aleksandra (Sasha) Chernykh, Co-Founder & Lead Consultant, Glassjaw compared notes on what actually changes for activation teams when the customer data platform lives inside the warehouse and where the model still hits its limits.
Q. There’s a lot of noise about composable and native CDPs on Snowflake this year. What’s actually different in the conversations you’re having with customers, versus twelve months ago?
Paul McCord, Zeotap: The procurement conversation has shortened noticeably. A year ago, most customers came in evaluating a CDP as a standalone vendor decision: security review, InfoSec, the full cycle. Today, more of them arrive with Snowflake already approved internally and treat the CDP as an additional module on a platform they already trust. That shifts the buying committee, the timelines and, frankly, the objections. The question is less “can we trust this vendor” and more “how do we get this live inside our existing governance.”
Aleksandra (Sasha) Chernykh, Glassjaw: The conversation has moved from access to agreement. A year ago, many CRM teams were asking data teams for exports so they could build audiences in their own tools. Now, they increasingly want to work from the definitions analytics already trusts. “Active customer”, “lapsed”, “high value”: when those numbers disagree between the dashboard and the campaign tool, the CRM team loses the argument every time. We’re seeing CRM and data teams come together much earlier, with better questions about definitions, ownership and activation.
Q. Where do you see teams struggle when the CDP sits outside the warehouse?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Chernykh, Glassjaw: I see the same three things break. The first is timing. When data has to be copied out before anyone can act on it, the sync schedule quietly becomes the real send time. That is how a customer who bought an hour ago still gets the abandoned-cart email, discount included.
The second is definitions. Each team rebuilds its cohorts in the tool it owns, the numbers drift apart, and nobody can say which list is right.
The third is measurement. Behavioural events land in the activation tool but don’t always make it back into the analytical layer cleanly, so teams can see who clicked but struggle to connect that activity to what actually changed. The result is hundreds of segments and no way to tell which ones earn their keep.
Paul McCord, Zeotap: The pattern I’d add is what happens to governance. When customer data is copied into a second environment, the row access policies, masking rules and role-based controls have to be maintained in two places. Teams get it right on day one, and then over eighteen months the two systems drift. That’s not a criticism of any specific architecture — it’s just what happens when the same rules live in two places and two teams own them.
Q. When the CDP runs natively in Snowflake, what changes in practice for the activation team?
Paul McCord, Zeotap: Three things, in the order teams tend to notice them. First, no data transit at activation, which removes a class of compliance conversations. Second, inherited governance: the access rules already in the warehouse apply to the CDP automatically, not by mirroring. Third, and this is the one that matters most for activation teams: the features engineered for analytics and the features used for segmentation live in the same place. You stop rebuilding definitions of “active customer” or “high-value cohort” in two systems that don’t quite agree with each other.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Chernykh, Glassjaw: The biggest change is that targeting can become much closer to the actual customer state. Imagine a customer who browsed repeatedly, purchased yesterday and has since become a high-value customer. Instead of CRM working from yesterday’s exported segment while analytics has the newer picture, both can work from the same underlying data and definitions. That changes more than audience building. Suppression, prioritisation, personalisation and next-best-action decisions can all become more reliable. For the activation team, the value isn’t really “the CDP is in Snowflake”. It’s that fewer assumptions sit between what the business knows about a customer and the experience that customer actually receives.
Q. Where’s the native model the wrong answer?
Paul McCord, Zeotap: When Snowflake isn’t the strategic Data Cloud, or when a team is running multiple warehouses in parallel and wants to keep that optionality, the native route costs more than it gives back. Same story if the warehouse itself is immature, the CDP will inherit whatever governance gaps are already there. In those cases, the external Zero-Copy model is the right answer, not a fallback.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Chernykh, Glassjaw: When the problem isn’t the data. If the emails go out too often or say the wrong thing, moving the CDP won’t fix that, and it’s one of the most common issues I find in CRM audits. I’d also be cautious where Snowflake isn’t genuinely the organisation’s central customer-data layer yet. Native architecture is powerful when the foundation underneath it is mature. It shouldn’t become a reason to redesign an entire data estate when the actual problem is strategy, execution or operating model.
Q. You’re both at Snowflake World Tour this month. What conversation do you want to have with people who stop by?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Chernykh, Glassjaw):The question I’d love to hear is: “We have Snowflake, we have a CRM platform, and we have plenty of customer data, so why are our customer experiences still disconnected?” That’s where the interesting conversation starts. The next phase isn’t about collecting more data. It’s about shortening the distance between what a brand knows about a customer and what it actually does with that knowledge.
Paul McCord, Zeotap: The most useful conversations I have at these events are with teams who’ve already made the Snowflake bet and are trying to work out what should stay in the warehouse and what shouldn’t. If that’s you, come and find us, the honest answer is usually more interesting than the pitch.
