Who are my top sellers? What kinds of deals have the highest close rate? How have our sales opportunities changed over time? As a sales leader, these are just some of the questions you ask yourself every day to keep your team on track. And the answers are in your data. Every form fill, cold call, and MQL is another data point you can use to assess the health of your sales organization.

In a recent webinar by TDWI, 45% of analysts reported that “every day seems to be a different fire drill.” No surprise to anyone in the industry. As much as analysts need to be focused on more strategic tasks, their skills are frequently deployed to answer basic questions. Greater self-service capabilities for end-users would no doubt alleviate these fire drills, but this is not yet a reality for the majority of companies.

Sometimes I walk through the grocery store and marvel at the way customers float through the aisles, blissfully unaware of the logistical nightmare it probably took to stock the shelves. They have no idea how many people, systems, and modes of transportation it takes to make everything magically appear on their grocery shelves. But I do. As the Senior Director of Software Engineering at KlearNow, I spend my days preserving the bliss of those grocery shoppers.

Since the start of the pandemic, business demands on your IT team have skyrocketed. You need granular, actionable insights to keep up with the speed and volume of digital transformation projects and IT incidents occurring across your organization. Canned reports from SaaS-based systems like ServiceNow aren’t fundamentally built for analytics.

Growth. It’s the mountain every startup founder must learn to climb in order to run a successful business. And as with any great mountain, the journey to the top never feels more daunting than at the base. How your startup earns its first 10 customers will set the tone for the rest of the trek and determine how fast your team reaches the summit — if at all.