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.

This year, the holiday season reminded us we have a healthy appetite, not just for food, but also for additions to the Zendesk Apps Marketplace. This month we added 14 new apps and integrations to the general marketplace and we hope you saved room for them.

When two of the world’s most recognized fine watch brands, Citizen and Bulova, merged in 2018, they faced more than just the challenge of maintaining their distinctive identities, unique designs, and technologies. With one support organization having to serve customers for both brands, it became clear that streamlining the way the customer service team operated needed to be a priority—or else the customer experience would suffer. At issue?

Customers are engaging with more connected devices than ever before—they’re getting around on smart electric scooters, slyly reading text messages on Apple Watches during meetings, and telling Amazon Alexa which Cardi B song to play next—all of which is part of a phenomenon known as the Internet of Things (IoT). And, this is only the tip of the hyper-connected iceberg. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that there will be 41.6 billion connected devices in 2025.

‘Tis the season to be flying. This year, the TSA expects a “record breaking holiday season.” Between Thanksgiving and New Years, tens of millions of people will be traveling across the United States, with over 41 million travelers crossing state lines in the Christmas season alone. With all the waiting, spending, and flying, traveling can be stressful.