The HubSpot data enrichment controversy generated plenty of heat. Alexi Hatch, CMO of Acoustic, is more interested in the light.
Speaking with CX Today’s Rhys Fisher, Hatch reframes the episode not as a one-company scandal but as a symptom of a wider industry habit she calls “signal debt” — the over-reliance on borrowed, static enrichment data that tells you what a contact’s job title was last quarter but nothing about what they actually want today.
“Piling on more enrichment and external data feels like deeper customer understanding, but it’s just an illusion of intelligence,” Hatch says. “The antidote to signal debt isn’t borrowing more consumer signals, it’s having the in-house capabilities to analyze better ones.”
The conversation covers where brands typically go wrong, with Hatch pointing to declining open rates and flat engagement as the clearest early signs that a CRM built on static data is running out of road. She also draws a hard line on consent — opt-in, she argues, is black and white, and brands that rely on “fuzzy” opt-ins are storing up a trust problem that no amount of enrichment will fix.
The discussion then shifts to the activation gap: collecting behavioral data is one challenge, but acting on it fast enough to be relevant is another. If the insight and action layers of your tech stack can’t talk to each other in real time, the window closes before the message lands.
For CX and marketing leaders trying to make sense of where the industry goes from here, it’s a grounded and practically useful conversation.
