Back in 2001, when I started working in the enterprise marketing software business, customer relationship management or CRM was seen as the cure all from a sales and marketing perspective. "If only we could more quickly send direct mailers offering a buy one, get one video rental, we could corner the market" one executive told me. CRM deployments at that time were costly and resource intensive. My how times have changed. But one thing hasn't changed – there remains three critical components to consider when standing up a solid customer intelligence software solution – data, insight and action. Data meaning a centralized data repository – containing first and third-party data.