I want it all, and I want it now! - Queen
There's a growing breed of marketers who are bringing more precision to their field using data and analytics in clever ways. Precision marketing, we call it.

These are managers who are Excel jockeys, licking their lips at the prospect of Windows Vista helping them break that 65K row barrier. These are people who can spot a Logistic Regression at ten paces and are bending statistics to marketing applications in creative ways. Finally, these are tech-freaks who understand how to host and process a billion records to churn out a one page report. Some are all three, more power to them.

This new breed of marketer is quietly creating a new number driven way of marketing, here are some of its more prominent characteristics:

Mass empowerment through information
A bank wants 3000 DMAs to get dashboards on performance and trends. An insurance company wants its top 1000 agents to get custom MIS. A retailer wants its 100 store managers to get custom reports on its Loyalty programme members.

No more the domain of wisened wizards in a corner of the office, business intelligence in all its avatars - dashboards, scorecards, exception reports, analytics - is getting mass consumed. It's not just middle and senior management either; it's the channel, the sales force, the dealer - everybody wants reports and insights to do better business.

The business objective here is that of mass empowerment of various levels of the channel with smart analysis and reports. Reports that help them identify their best customers, spot exceptions, see sales trends, and ultimately grow their business to meet and exceed their targets. It's your sales channel, and it needs to be the first consume and use the data and analysis that the head office possesses.