“It’s a fairly typical beginning for a lot of software companies,” said Jim Lochry, SVP Corporate Development for ConnectLeader. “They start out as a consulting company, looking at and solving problems.”

In 2008, the founder of ConnectLeader, Senraj Soundar, looked at the CRM space with the intent of making the next generation of CRM systems. What he found, according to Lochry, was that “companies weren’t getting value out of the CRM itself.” After looking at some of the large players emerging in this space, Senraj realized that he didn’t need to build the next greatest CRM, but to make a product and solution that would leverage the investment companies had already made in their selected CRM. He could see, as Lochry put it, “that all that data was there, but was not being exploited.”

Recently, Salesforce.com’s chief executive officer, Marc Benioff, made a bid to purchase Twitter. In fact, he has been on a shopping spree, snapping up companies such as Demandware for ecommerce and productivity software maker Quip Inc. In the last few years, he’s also purchased a slew of artificial intelligence startups that formed the basis for its new CRM solution, Einstein.

Is Marc onto something? And, why is Twitter, the company that Wall Street has written off, so valuable to a CRM Provider such as Salesforce.com? The simple answer: Knowledge!

Auto racing is a great analogy for a sales team. Many companies try to make repairs (or changes) to the sale team while they are performing daily calls. It’s akin to tuning a race car while it’s speeding down the track at 225 MPH.  Needless to say, in order to tune the car, it has to go into the pit. Unfortunately with sales teams, coming to a full stop is hardly an option.

However, when some companies come to a full stop (pit time!), they miss fine tuning the lead nurturing process. This issue is amplified at small and mid-size organizations as they don't have enough data in lead management systems to identify and address the proper issues. A good CRM system with carefully captured conversations data adds the right tools to find and fix problems.