Business intelligence dashboards have been around since the eighties but the jury is still out as to whether these "intelligence" tools are effective at delivering better results. Over the past few years, enterprise managers have adopted marketing and sales dashboards as a way of measuring performance of their marketing and sales teams. Most popular preconfigured models provide a screen full of graphs, tables, and other visual aids which depict real-time outputs. However, out-of-the-box products don't often provide data in a manner that optimizes performance.

The reality is that marketing returns are higher than sales returns. While marketing campaigns do also require the time and energy of talented employees, it doesn’t require hiring more workers to up the marketing ante.