Smart businesses of every size have always understood how important it is to build and maintain good relationships with their customers.

Good administrators and sales managers would accumulate information on their best accounts and file it away mainly in paper records or random spreadsheets but often only in their own personal memory. Gathering information that way was time-consuming, inefficient and actually of limited value. It could easily be overlooked or lost and deriving value from it was much more art than science, depending on the intuition of the person closest to the customer.