Close deals faster with a powerful Sales Cloud and Slack solution

With hiring freezes widespread, capital expensive and GDP growth flat, leaders everywhere are looking for ways to promote efficient growth while dramatically cutting costs. We hear you. Today at the Salesforce World Tour NYC, we’re announcing new Salesforce and Slack productivity solutions to help organizations grow revenue—faster and at scale—while saving costs.

Immediately available will be a Sales Productivity Bundle that helps customers automate work to drive efficient growth and give sales teams a consistent way to work as a team, connected to all their systems, data and customers. And even better: we’ll be previewing a powerful new solution that will supercharge a salesperson’s ability to close deals quickly. Powered by Salesforce Customer 360 and available early next year, the Sales Cloud and Slack solution will bring together critical insights and scalable automation with the people who can act on them.

The way sales teams have historically operated is inefficient. Stakeholders aren’t aligned, because they often work in siloed teams; decisions are made based on stale pipeline data; new hires spend weeks trying to get properly onboarded, etc. These inefficiencies are exacerbated by the fact that teams don’t have a centralized workplace to get their work done. In fact, Salesforce’s new State of Sales Report found that reps spend only 28% of their week selling, and 66% say they’re overwhelmed by using too many sales tools. The solution? Unifying teams in Slack, where sales reps can access all of their tools, data and even their customers without effort and unending back-and-forths.

“Sales teams are the backbone of an organization’s growth, and revenue strategies are now squarely focused on sales productivity and process efficiency,” says Rob Seaman, Slack’s SVP of Product Management. “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.”

Speed up the sales cycle by making real-time insights accessible to everyone in your workspace

Closing deals is a team effort. Sales reps often rely on other departments—legal, product, procurement—to get answers and approve contracts. But deals can get bogged down in disjointed email strings when people aren’t working together in a centralized space. Stakeholders lack context and access to information being shared, which can lead to misalignment and delays in decision-making.

To collaborate and close deals faster, our new solution connects sellers and cross-functional stakeholders to the single source of truth they need in Slack. It does this by automating the push and pull of real-time CRM data from Sales Cloud directly into Slack channels (and, in the future, into an account-planning canvas embedded in a channel). Account teams can see opportunities and customer details piped into channels dedicated to a specific customer account—and all of the information is visible by people working on the account.

Users can also send account updates from Sales Cloud into Slack channels, where reps can work together on next steps. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update the CRM with account details with built-in slash commands. Say goodbye to out-of-date data and hello to more transparency and accountability across the board.

In addition, our solution lets you analyze engagement metrics and insights measuring Slack’s impact on helping teams achieve their sales goals. Leaders can learn and act on these insights to continually optimize work processes over time.

Simplify operations by employing strategic, out-of-the-box features where you need them

The new solution has a gallery of out-of-the-box templates teams can use on day one. These templates let you create a workplace with clean sidebar sections, easy-to-navigate channels and time-saving automations that fit your teams’ specific needs. Best of all, they work in partnership with best-practice workflows.

For example, an onboarding template allows you to add workflows that trigger as soon as your new hire gets added to Slack. This template can include a canvas with an onboarding message and links to welcome videos, and a workflow can automatically add them to the channels they need to access. Another workflow can alert them to complete specific tasks, such as filling out HR forms and reading onboarding materials. By using standardized templates, you can quickly implement processes that modern sales teams use to be successful.

Slack is deepening its integrations with the rest of Salesforce’s products so our customers can do more work with less effort. Our productivity solutions allow sales operations to organize sales teams so they can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time contributing to their business’s bottom line.

With Slack and Salesforce, build the resilient and high-performing environment your sales team needs to thrive. Look for the release of our new solution early next year, and start maximizing savings by using our Sales Productivity Bundle, now with Slack to deliver success now.

The preceding information is intended for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, and not as a binding commitment. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack, and are subject to change.