In most organizations, the highest-performing sales reps are eventually promoted to management. But being a manager is a much different job than being a rep. You can be at the very top of your trade, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good leader. I experienced this firsthand when I moved into management. I was good at sales, but I wasn’t really good at leading. You’re not taught that it’s a completely different job that operates in a gray area every single day.

A business can’t thrive without lead generation, however, the more leads you generate, the more selective you have to be in your pursuits. Sales rep don’t want to waste time chasing a large list of dead-end leads. That time could be spent nurturing more promising leads. Yet, when it comes to valuing leads, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? Experience and gut instinct goes a long way, but they aren’t enough.

Customers may not be interested in your customer experience software – but your company absolutely should be. When done right, a simple and sophisticated customer experience platform is a key tool for creating loyalty. For companies, it means being able to seamlessly communicate with customers across the channels they want – including email, chat, text, phone and social media. For customers, it fosters a sense of trust that they can reach you the way they want.

Messaging has changed the way we communicate. Relationships big and small — from the personal to the political to the commercial – can be mapped out across conversations in the messaging apps almost everybody uses every day. In our annual conversational business report, State of Messaging 2020, we look at the biggest messaging stories from the past year, along with research, reporting, and predictions on how the future of messaging between brands and customers will play out.

The emergence of bots, AI, and interactivity in messaging has transformed channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage from places we chat to platforms where we do business. Conversational business is only going in one direction—Gartner estimates that “by 2022, 70% of all customer interactions will involve emerging tools like chatbots, machine learning, and mobile messaging, up from 15% in 2018.”

In the past 3 years, the AI space has become so noisy that even seasoned executives struggle to cut through the jargon, making it challenging to deliver against an AI strategy. Support leaders face a series of roadblocks. The AI space overall isn’t accessible to the business stakeholders who want to leverage it for improved customer experience.

Identifying the attributes that constitute a qualified lead can be a complicated process, especially if your product caters to a wide variety of customers. Your sales reps need a clear and structured strategy to ensure their lead qualification process is both consistent and reliable. A lead qualification checklist establishes the criteria and step-by-step framework your team needs to ensure the leads they work have the highest probability of becoming future customers.

Lots of companies say they’re customer focused. But are they really? The fact is, most companies think more about profits than how they treat their customers. That makes sense on the surface–after all, any business needs to be profitable to stay afloat. But in the long run, it’s much healthier for the bottom line to put customer needs in focus. A single angry customer can create a social media firestorm with a complaint.

For SaaS businesses, no metric matters more than monthly recurring revenue (MRR). That’s because they rely on recurring revenue to run their business. MRR is how they track whether that revenue is growing, plateauing, or declining. And following that trend, they can predict future sales revenue and adjust their budget as needed. Read on to learn how MRR is calculated and how SaaS companies can leverage it to create more accurate sales forecasts and better budgets for their business.

In order to grow your business, revenue needs to exceed the costs of running your company. This may seem like a “Thank you Captain Obvious” concept. But the truth is, accurately calculating revenue to plan for future expenses and growth is not as cut and dried as you may think.That’s because there are different types of revenue, each one requiring a unique revenue formula to calculate.