Any salesperson with a few years under their belt knows that sales ebbs and flows. Sometimes, there are big waves — that’s good for business, and it’s good for commission. Other times, it’s hard to hook buyers and quota is out of reach. How do you forecast revenue with these ups and down? Simple: average deal size.  Below, we’ll walk through how to calculate this critical metric, ways to use it, and how to increase it — so those forecasts and commission checks are easier to count on. What you’ll learn: What is average deal size? Why is average deal size important? What you need to know b ..read more

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to redefine the tech world, poised to revolutionize small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) through optimizing operations and enhancing employee efficiency. Although originally explored by large enterprises, AI is now also transforming the way small businesses work.  While it might seem daunting, getting started with AI for small business is actually much simpler than it seems. But what is it and why is there so much chatter around it? Let’s discuss why AI is taking the world by storm and how your SMB can begin exploring its potential.  Let’s tal ..read more

Good customer service is important — whether we’re receiving or providing it. But what is good customer service, anyway? Good customer service means meeting customer needs and expectations consistently. This can lead to business growth — even when you’re not at your best. Our research found that 88% of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase again. What’s more, 75% of customers forgave a company’s mistakes after receiving excellent customer service. Let’s look at the ins and outs of good customer service and how to set up for success. What you’ll learn: What is ..read more

We’ve come a long way since the ancient Greek chariot — the bicycle, the car, the segway? — but we’ve still never improved on the wheel. Some things are so great they don’t need to be reinvented. With all the change coming to sales today — the data, the automation, the AI — there’s some comfort in knowing that the most basic sales best practices are here to stay.  We’re sharing 18 of those sales best practices below, culled from the most successful sales professionals we know with decades of experience among them. This guidance ranges from joining a sales community to basing decisions on ..read more

Data Cloud is a data platform that unifies all of your company’s data on to Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, giving every team a 360-degree view of the customer to drive automation and analytics, personalize engagement, and power trusted AI. Data Cloud creates this holistic customer view by turning volumes of disconnected data into a single, trusted model that’s easy to access and understand. This includes diverse data sets, like telemetry data, web engagement data and more across your organization or your external data lakes and warehouses. And this unified view helps your Sales, Service, an ..read more

Your company may be exploring Einstein Copilot – Salesforce’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant – and learning about its capabilities to improve productivity. While Copilot comes out of the box with actions that make common tasks easy, you can also design custom ones. But there are a few aspects to consider before you design custom actions. Let’s think through the considerations together: What are Einstein Copilot Actions? Do you need to design custom actions? Collaboration is essential Five tips for designing custom Copilot Actions Keep exploring actions What are Einstein Copilot Actions ..read more

There are many pitfalls to a sales org that deals with patched-together tech and dated processes. Information is hard to track, and there’s little transparency. For reps, this can translate into dollars and cents: a lack of commission clarity and effective tracking might mean they lose out on hard-earned money. That’s where shadow accounting (number crunching by reps) comes into play. In this article, we’ll dive into what shadow accounting looks like in modern-day sales orgs and how it came to be. Then we’ll take a look at some of the real-life impacts for sales teams across industries. What y ..read more

Remember the last time you moved? You probably had to pack up too much stuff, transport it in a truck and unpack it in the new location – hoping it survived the trip. Imagine if your furniture and belongings could just teleport to your new place in perfect condition. It’s not possible (yet) in the physical world, but with zero copy integration, that’s how you can handle your customer data. Thanks to zero copy or zero ETL (extract-transform-load), it’s possible to share data among two or more data stores without actually moving it. This is great news to companies that store data in a cloud data ..read more

The motto of the artificial intelligence (AI) moment might be: quality data inputs equal quality outputs. There are many ways to unpack that statement. But let’s focus on seven ways conversation design can help make AI-enabled experiences more inclusive of the diversity of ways people input their customer relationship management (CRM) data. This matters because how a person prefers to communicate and the way they speak or write determines how they might interact with your AI. What we’ll cover: What is conversation design? How does it influence AI? Design for nuances of human communications sty ..read more

B2B marketers are used to wearing a bunch of different hats, from planning journeys to building out first-party data and account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. Every marketer we know could use a personal assistant, but with budget restrictions and reduced resources, that’s not always feasible. The good news is that artificial intelligence (AI) in B2B marketing can deliver the productivity boost you need. Our research has found that marketers estimate AI will save them an average of five hours a week. However, nearly 40% of marketers say they do ..read more