MarketStar Blog

Sales success today depends on a combination of strategy, skill, technology, and process. With buyers conducting 57% of their purchase research before engaging with a sales rep¹, traditional sales tactics are no longer enough. A well-structured sales playbook is an essential tool that streamlines processes, enhances productivity, and aligns teams for success. 

Many organizations experience friction between sales and customer support teams. Sales teams are often under pressure to meet aggressive targets, sometimes pushing leads that aren't the right fit. When these deals close, the burden shifts to customer support, which must manage customer expectations and resolve issues that could have been avoided¹. 

This disconnect creates internal distrust and diminishes customer satisfaction, leading to higher churn rates and lost revenue. The solution? Aligning sales and customer support to create a collaborative, customer-focused dynamic. 

Here’s why integrating these two teams is crucial for business success.

The contact center plays a critical role in shaping customer experience (CX) in today’s always-on, digital-first world. Over the years, contact center technology has evolved significantly, with new innovations constantly enhancing customer interactions.

Business growth is fueled by reaching new audiences and increasing your potential customer base. However, targeting new audiences, especially those beyond what you usually encounter or engage with, can be tricky and tough. So, to make ad targeting simpler for advertisers, AI-powered tools, such as look-alike modeling, have been developed.

When the best partners have countless companies vying for their attention, how do you stand out from the rest and build a mutually beneficial relationship? The answer lies in well-executed partner marketing programs and tactics, which happen at the intersection of sales enablement, to-partner marketing, and through-partner marketing.

Software-defined data centers (SDDCs) continue to become an attractive option for organizations looking to maximize versatility with their data environments. According to a report from Allied Market Research, the market for SDDCs will grow to an impressive $139 billion by 2022. Organizations that get on board with this trend will be well-positioned for this expansion.

To succeed in channel sales, it’s essential to emphasize thought leadership as a way to enable existing partners and attract new ones. According to Forbes, thought leadership takes marketing to a new level. It increases the visibility of your organization by accelerating marketing efforts to accomplish goals and generate new leads.

In today’s competitive landscape, customer expectations are reshaping how businesses operate. While product-centric companies focus on innovation and technical capabilities, customer-centric organizations prioritize solving real customer problems. This shift is driven by the realization that long-term success depends not just on selling products but on building relationships and delivering exceptional experiences. Companies that place the customer at the core of their strategy are outperforming their competitors, driving loyalty, and ensuring sustainable growth.

Moving goal posts: it’s what keeps CEOs up at night as they attempt to navigate the tide of this entirely disruptive, ever-changing digital economy. Consider Kodak. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012, failing to realize opportunities in digital photography, a technology that it invented. How did things go so wrong for Kodak? They had the data. They had the market intelligence to make the right decision, and yet they didn’t. Many businesses are on the verge of their own ‘Kodak moment’, this time at the behest of artificial intelligence (AI), the cognitive technology that has the potential to disrupt business as we know it.

Customer experience (CX) is the emerging competitive differentiator for brands. According to Dimension Data’s ‘2017 Global Customer Experience (CX) Benchmarking Report’,¹ 70.9% of boardrooms recognize CX as their most important strategic performance measure. CX can broadly be defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your brand.