At Salesforce World Tour New York, Slack announced tighter integration between Slack and Salesforce Sales Cloud. The intention is to assist organisations as they face waning revenues brought about by the cost-of-living crisis and the recession. The solution enables organisations to better leverage the tools without having to cope with a significant software investment to achieve the same results.
The newly announced Sales Productivity bundle enables organisations to simplify their technology stack at a lower price; it offers 50% savings. However, it is only available until 31st December 2022. This announcement follows other bundles from Salesforce, including the Automation Everywhere bundle and the Marketing Effectiveness Bundle in the last few weeks.
In 2023 it will launch a new solution that will bring together Sales Cloud and Slack, powered by Salesforce Customer 360. It will enable sales teams to work with each other and with other teams to share knowledge and insights about customers. It aims to remove the silos within organisations. Slack and Salesforce identify three benefits of the new solution:
- It will drive sales productivity with automated workflows and alerts that leverage best practices
- The elimination of data, process and communication silos will accelerate sales deals
- Team members will collaborate more effectively, helping to move the business forward faster
The unification of tools is an aim identified in the new State of Sales Report that Salesforce has published. 66% of respondents felt overwhelmed by the number of tools they used. Furthermore, sales reps spend only 28% of their time selling.
Rob Seaman, Slack’s SVP of Product Management, commented, “Sales teams are the backbone of an organization’s growth, and revenue strategies are now squarely focused on sales productivity and process efficiency. The future of selling is connecting the right people with the right information, all in one digital workspace. This ultimately empowers sales reps to close deals and resolve issues faster, and — most importantly — cultivate thriving, long-term customer relationships.”
The new solution
Technical details about the new solution are a bit light in the release, but inferences can be drawn.
Sales Cloud users can leverage Slack to automate the business processes that are part of the deal-making but do not fall within the relationship between the seller and buyer. Slack will power processes between different functions, such as legal for contract terms and finance for quotation approvals. It will achieve this by enabling users to pull Salesforce data from Sales Cloud direct into Slack channels. A future enhancement will enable this information into account planning canvases in the account channel.
Before that enhancement rolls out, account teams can update the Slack channel enabling Sales Reps to see updates no matter where they are. Anyone working on the account can share their viewpoint to give a true customer a 360-degree view.
Sales teams will also be able to use slash commands within Slack to update the record in the CRM solution from within the Slack channel. Though Salesforce has not indicated which slash commands are supported and whether there will be any new ones. Salesforce will also enable business leaders to measure how each engagement across Slack and Salesforce is performing. They can see which channels are performing well and what engagement metrics are across the business and with customers. This data can help leaders make data-driven decisions for improvement.
When it launches, the solution will include a prebuilt template that customers can access on day one. They can also create a workspace with sidebar sections and easy-to-navigate channels for each engagement. These have been developed in line with best practices, and customers will be able to add new workflows and triggers. The template will be able to include a canvas that can automate onboarding with welcome videos, messages and the creation of appropriate Slack channels. These templates will help automate several administrative tasks that sales reps abhor.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is the first of several integrations that will see Slack more deeply embedded into the Salesforce platform. The initial offering offers the promise of automation across several disjointed tasks that sales reps currently have to endure. However, Salesforce has yet to launch this product, and while it offers a date of 2023, it does not give a fixed date.
With the departure of Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, and of Bret Taylor, who led the acquisition of Slack, this announcement shows that life is currently business as usual. What comes after this, in terms of how Slack will both grow independently and where the firms will take the integration, is unknown.
Slack has the opportunity to become a key part of the Salesforce platform. While Sales Cloud and Slack integration is a step closer, there are still opportunities for further integration across the platform.
