Reducing the time it takes to resolve a customer issue makes everyone happier. Getting there, especially if you’re aiming to shave minutes off your average service time, requires a smart and laser-like focus in helping customer support reps to be more productive.

A quality customer experience requires a dedicated sales team and support team. Sales reps start conversations with leads, and support reps continue those conversations once those leads become customers. But considering the way in which the former group passes the torch to the latter, it’s worth asking: Why aren’t more sales reps and support agents having conversations with one another?

As sales reps, we’re all familiar with monthly quota stresses. When it gets down to the wire, you add as many leads as you can to the pipeline to maximize potential deals. And it works! You successfully meet your sales quota. But there’s a new problem—your close rate is appalling.

We’re excited to announce that Sell is now in the Zendesk Apps Marketplace, introducing a new line of apps to help sales teams sell more. Since 2012, the Zendesk Marketplace has powered the world of customer support. With just under 1,000 apps available for Zendesk Support and Chat, the Marketplace has allowed support organizations to extend Zendesk products to address unique business needs and ultimately enable companies to create the best customer experience possible for their customers.

One in four sales managers report being unhappy with their forecast accuracy, according to CSO Insights. However, it’s not always clear what your options are when you’re looking for a better alternative. For starters, most sales forecasting methods tend to follow one of two general approaches. The first is based on analyzing past revenue results and using that historical data to project future earnings, as in the case of a run rate or exponential smoothing formula.

Understanding the latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) can seem overwhelming, but if it’s learning the basics that you’re interested in, you can boil many AI innovations down to two concepts: machine learning and deep learning. These terms often seem like they’re interchangeable buzzwords, hence why it’s important to know the differences.

Many companies use Excel as their sales tracker tool. It’s one of the most popular database organization tools, so sales teams assume it’s the best software for tracking their activity. The reality is Excel isn’t an ideal sales tracker. It’s a complex software that can be a bottleneck for reps without Excel skills. More dangerously, Excel leaves room for error as a manual tool and limits analysis to hard-to-learn formulas and formatting.

When it comes to setting quotas, a lot of sales managers like to turn to a simple annual run rate. And while an ARR may be the quickest and easiest way to predict future sales results, we’ve seen that it’s far from the most precise metric. By contrast, the exponential smoothing formula lies on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Although it’s one of the most complicated sales forecasting methods, it is also arguably the most accurate.

You’ve read every article, watched all of the webinars, and you’re convinced: today is the day we take our customer service to the next level. But it turns out that buying into the importance of good customer service is the easy job. First you have to uncover the definition of good customer service, and then provide proof to management in sales, product, and other departments that exactly how customer service has a major impact on your company’s bottom line.

Sales is a mind game. You can’t expect to convert a lead into a customer if you don’t understand the motivations behind their purchasing decisions. Why? Because humans have innate psychological tendencies—cognitive biases—that affect their perspectives and decisions. If you want to convert more leads, you have to understand what motivates them and how to use that to your advantage. This article is a guide to doing just that.