Most businesses strategize sales through the eyes of the customer. What do customers want? How do we make customers happy? What are the best upsell strategies? These are all worthwhile questions—and the customer is certainly important—but no company can help their customers if they have internal issues in serious need of fixing. That’s where sales and operations planning (S&OP) comes in.

While leaders navigate a constantly changing reality, they must keep thinking about how to drive their business forward. As many companies hold on deploying new initiatives until the outlook is more clear, they are eyeing where current investments can be made: such as in customer experience. Why CX? Where human interactions are concerned, it’s quality, not quantity that ultimately matters most—now more than ever before.

When it comes to sales, it’s easy to believe that no opportunity is a wasted opportunity. If you throw a product at enough people, someone is bound to buy it, right? Technically…yes. But say you spent money and effort to contact 100 random people about your product. Seventy-five of them aren’t in your target audience, 10 of the remaining 25 can’t afford your product, and 14 are happy with their current product from a competitor.

Today’s businesses are looking to provide customers with improved experiences while decreasing service costs—and they’re quickly learning that chatbots and conversational AI can facilitate these goals. By 2024, experts say the global chatbot market will reach $9.4 million. What customer service leaders may not understand, however, is which of the two technologies could have the most impact on their buyers and their bottom line.

Every salesperson is eager to hit their monthly quota—the more sales, the better. But the road to that finish line is reliant on a set of key players: sales leads. Before sales reps can meet their targets, they need a clear understanding of what a sales lead is and how a lead is different from a prospect. They must also be armed with proven lead generation strategies to get people on the path to becoming a customer. We’ve got you covered.

For support agents, organizing and triaging customer requests from various channels is already a challenge. The fact that 73 percent of consumers plan to continue using new support channels only makes ticket management more complex. The best way to beat the odds and consistently provide your customers with quick and effective responses? Ticketing systems. Ticketing systems document and track customer issues and interactions, making it easier for customer service teams to manage their support cases.

When you think of sales analytics and metrics, do you only think of your company’s net gains and losses? If so, you’re not alone. Up to 73 percent of company data goes unused every year. 73 percent. That’s despite the fact that more and more companies are talking about big data and putting substantial amounts of money and manpower into capturing that data.

The term “prospecting” has its origins in the California Gold Rush. Forty-niners (named for the year these fortune seekers began to arrive in droves) would sift through rocks and dirt, keeping their eyes peeled for the shimmer of precious metals. Over 170 years later, most of the “prospectors” in San Francisco rely more on their laptops than on their pickaxes. But the sales prospecting methods they engage in today are still aimed at uncovering golden opportunities.

We’ve all been the victim of a bad sales script. Whether in a cold call or a company follow-up, it’s painful to sit there while an uninformed sales rep fumbles their way through information you don’t need until you hang up out of mercy. Sales scripts have a bad reputation. But the fact is, a strong sales script can be a game-changer for your company and your sales team.

For many businesses, migrating support operations to new help desk software can be intimidating. That hesitancy can be rooted in fears that the process will be too challenging, expensive, and time-consuming. And when using old help desk platforms, companies often ignore the flaws and limitations. That willingness to “make do” and kick the can down the road is a very human quality. Frankly, there are no good reasons for being stuck with subpar software.