Salesforce and Slack Integration: First Steps After $28B Acquisition

Salesforce and Slack Integration: A New Era of CRM

Following its acquisition of Slack late last year for approximately $28 billion, Salesforce has unveiled its initial plans for integrating the two platforms. These integrations are designed to enhance the experience for existing Salesforce customers.

Rob Seaman, Senior Vice President for Slack at Salesforce, positions Slack as the central communication hub for Salesforce users. He stated the goal is for Slack to become the primary interface for user engagement, workflows, and the applications they utilize.

The announced capabilities focus on bolstering sales, service, marketing, and analytics functions. Salesforce is both defining best practices and formally establishing how organizations can adapt their sales, service, and marketing structures within this evolving landscape.

The core objective is to leverage Slack’s ability to incorporate external enterprise applications, thereby streamlining and automating Salesforce tasks. This aims to improve efficiency and user experience by minimizing the need to switch between different platforms.

Enhanced Sales Cloud Capabilities

The Sales Cloud will now feature dedicated deal rooms. These spaces will facilitate collaboration among all stakeholders involved in complex sales, including internal teams like finance and product development, as well as external partners.

Seaman highlighted the deal room as a straightforward method for connecting all parties to effectively close deals, including customers and partners. He emphasized the power of Slack Connect – introduced last year to enable communication with individuals outside the organization – in potentially reducing sales cycle durations.

Sales teams engaged in intricate deals will also receive automated daily updates delivered directly to Slack. These updates will include personalized task lists, meeting schedules, and prioritized deal information.

Improved Service Team Collaboration

Service teams will benefit from collaborative spaces called “swarms.” These rooms will allow team members to assist each other with specific questions or challenges. This is particularly valuable for companies with extensive product catalogs, enabling quicker access to expertise.

While Einstein recommendations provide related content suggestions, swarms offer a direct line to human experts when more specialized knowledge is required. Service team members can also search for and invite experts to the swarm for rapid problem-solving.

Marketing and Analytics Integrations

Marketing teams will gain access to intelligent insights powered by Datorama, a company Salesforce acquired in 2018. They will also receive regular updates within Slack regarding changes to marketing campaigns.

Furthermore, integrations with Tableau – acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for $15.7 billion – will deliver Slack updates whenever key data changes within Tableau. Users can also receive daily summaries of critical metrics directly in Slack.

Looking Ahead

Seaman indicated that these announcements represent only the initial phase of integration. Further enhancements and integrations are planned for unveiling at the upcoming Dreamforce customer conference and in the months following.

Expansion of integrations across sales, service, marketing, and analytics is underway, with every cloud and industry solution within the Salesforce product family actively working on similar integrations.