Recently, in one of the LinkedIn groups to which I am a member, a question was asked about customers which got me wondering how companies view their customers.

When your new sales leads come in, how do you qualify how valuable a prospect they are?

Do you simply rely on what you are told in emails or telephone conversations with the individual and believe their self-promoting hype about how they own the company, hold the purse strings and how their company is a multi-million pound global company? Or do you do a little detective work and find out that they are actually the cleaner for a local start-up?

With the latest editions of SugarCRM it's possible to follow twitter conversations and perform LinkedIn lookups from within the CRM without having to go the the relevant website.