Marketing

"A marketing department needs to find ways to help the company grow the top line," explained Gentile. More specifically, it needs the ability to analyze campaign returns, promotional yields, and fine-tune spending to get the biggest ROI. And business intelligence software, with its analytical capabilities, can provide your marketing team with the insights it needs to determine where marketing dollars are best spent. "Not only can a marketing team use it [BI software] to find the most effective campaigns and promotions and website activity," said Gentile, "but they can also use it to find the least effective areas" and adjust their spending accordingly, saving the company money and helping to drive growth.

Sales

With sales, business intelligence is all about process improvement, Gentile said, "analyzing the steps, time length or duration inside a broad number of customer opportunities within the sales funnel, then finding the best path and best practices." Without business intelligence software, managers are left guessing which sales techniques were the most effective in closing a deal quickly — or the least effective in the case of losing a sale. With the analytical tools that BI software provides, however, managers can gain specific insight into the sales pipeline and make adjustments accordingly.

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