Data-driven decisions have the power to impact every business area within the typical organization, but none of these functions carry the potential for game-changing insight like customerfacing sales and marketing.

Traditional customer data housed in a CRM system or marketing automation platform typically form the core of analyses these days, but more companies today explore the potential of merging and marrying this traditional data with unstructured, semi-structured, or multi-structured data.

From documents and emails to social media feeds and rich media, companies have the opportunity to exploit data to develop a deeper understanding of their customers than ever before.

The challenge for many of these organizations, however, is that the variety of data needed for these innovative analyses is often locked away within other functional areas.

Aberdeen Group’s research demonstrates that the sales and marketing functions face an elevated challenge around this silo effect.