How can marketers best make sense of database intelligence today?

Bruce Biegel, senior managing director, Winterberry Group

"There is a sea change in data, and the reason is consumer behavior. People are consuming media, content and transactions differently than before, on tablets and smartphones as well as computers. The key to syncing, matching and recognition is the email address. The more you can do to get people to subscribe, register or declare with their email addresses, the bigger pool you'll have available for matching that information with the known contacts in your CRM database. If you can organize this data, stop it from being so messy and segment it, you can then feed it into a decision engine to make the right offers to the right people at the right time."

Chris Blohm, senior VP-data and media services, MeritDirect

"Data licensing is a dramatic departure from how to sell and use data. Because of this type of list-buying method, marketers have changed the way they think about and acquire data. A one-year list license allows marketers to conduct multiple campaigns that delve deeper into companies; integrate the purchased data across various parts of the business, including both sales and marketing; better measure results, and compare them to the performance of in-house lists; and augment partial in-house records."

Charles Stryker, CEO, The Venture Development Center

"Companies are using less than one-tenth of 1% of the data they could be using. The opportunity in [leveraging] the appropriate data you're not [using] is monumental. With search marketing, b2b companies have an incredibly exciting advantage. They can identify every day those companies that have dramatically increased their search activity around a particular subject. So it's possible to identify all the companies whose employees are searching for what your company is selling. That's a fantastic trigger to know those companies that are entering the decision process to buy your products."