The process of converting leads into paying customers takes up much of the modern marketer’s time and effort, but the work hardly ends there. Sorting out the logistical details of closing a deal can prove almost as taxing when large numbers are involved, a challenge that Salesforce.com hopes to elevate with its latest investment.

The cloud giant led a $41 million round into a partner called Apttus Technologies AB through its venture capital arm this week with the goal of saving users some of the hassle involved in doing business. The Swedish outfit offers a service running directly on Salesforce’s namesake customer relationship management (CRM) platform that promises to automate much of the manual work typically required to hammer out transactions.

Apttus enables organizations to string together technical and business parameters into a price quote without most of the usual operational delays and back-and-forth with customers. Its namesake service centralizes cost estimates with other relevant material, which is useful for both legal and productivity purposes, and integrates the data into the broader sales workflow.

From there, the user can schedule the deliverables and payment milestones for the deal, attach the necessary clauses through the built-in version control system so to avoid potential inconsistencies and synchronize the details to their back-end processes. The entire procedure, from the initial quote all the way to the the final payment, can be monitored through a unified dashboard that Apttus says allows organizations check every step for compliance violations and any other irregularities.

That value proposition has earned the firm hundreds of customers ranging from mid-sized companies to Fortune 500 giants such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Verizon Communications Inc., among others. The new funding from Salesforce, K1 Capital and Iconiq is meant to help Apttus drive further adoption of its service, but that’s only one aspect of the investment.

The other could have even broader implications on the long run. The investment buys Salesforce, which also participated in the firm’s first $37 million funding round a year and a half ago, a substantial stake that could serve as convenient on-ramp to an eventual acquisition. A buy is more than likely given that Apttus already runs its service directly on the cloud giant’s platform.

But regardless of whether or not that possibility materalizes, being one of if not the biggest investor in the startup gives Salesforce the necessary pull to prevent it from expanding to competing CRM offerings that may stand to benefit from its capabilities. That alone probably justifies the investment.

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