About the Financial Times
The Financial Times, with its iconic pink paper, provides a wealth of news and insights for
readers and business decision-makers across the world. The FT Group employs 3,000 people across 40 countries and has hubs in major cities, including London, Hong Kong, and New York.
The challenge
Improving deal management and collaboration
The Financial Times wanted to make advertising deals easier to manage, improve visibility, and help sales teams collaborate with colleagues. It decided to streamline the sales cycle by replacing emails and attachments with a central communication platform.
The commercial team introduced Slack to automate workflows and keep everyone aligned from pitch to delivery. In the first year since going live, the FT has:
- Accelerated the sales cycle, enabling faster response times to clients
- Unlocked greater visibility over deals and their status
- Reduced the risk of missed or stuck opportunities
- Improved collaboration between teams.
How the Financial Times works better in Slack
Centralizing everything relating to deals in one place
Closing a deal with an advertiser can be a long and complex process, involving multiple teams, products, and campaign components. Previously, information and documents were shared by email, which made it difficult for sales reps to track the status of all the deals they were working on. This lack of visibility also meant that if a deal got stuck or delayed, it risked being overlooked, which could result in lost opportunities.
With ambitions to create a central control panel for deals, the commercial team decided to use Slack as the primary platform supporting sales.
“The FT tech teams already work in Slack, so we know it’s more than a simple messaging tool,” explained John Mercer, Commercial Operations Director at the Financial Times. “We compared it with other solutions and were impressed by how invested the company is in developing the platform. We’d also seen how other companies use it at Slack events and felt inspired to replicate that success at the FT.”
The team set up channels for deals, which sales reps use to track and manage them until they’re closed. Channels keep everything relating to each deal in one place, which John described as giving sales reps a “central source of truth when it comes to collaboration around the sales cycle.”
Notifications help reps prioritize tasks and focus on the right deals, and as they’re sent to everyone in the channel, the first available sales rep can pick up the next action without delay. This also helps keep deals moving when staff take a holiday, as information is no longer stored in inboxes.
The FT also uses Slack Connect to talk to external partners, which simplifies sharing the right information with multiple parties securely.
“Slack channels speed up turnaround. People can ask questions and get an immediate response, search for links and documents in the relevant channel, and read the thread to put information in context,” added John.
This level of insight also helps identify opportunities to improve processes and redefine roles and responsibilities to increase efficiency. It also means everyone knows which tasks they’re responsible for and how their work impacts their colleagues, creating a stronger culture of accountability and self-motivation.
“Slack is so much more than a messaging platform. It’s a lifeline for sales reps working on deals.”
Streamlining the sales cycle with automated workflows
With the sales team working in Slack, the FT used Workflow Builder and Flows to automate various touchpoints throughout the sales cycle. This includes trigger-based actions such as spinning up a Slack channel and pulling in the right team when a deal hits a certain threshold in the sales cycle.
As the deal progresses, more people are added to the channel to carry out the next steps and shape campaign concepts. Campaign managers plan delivery, while operations and targeting specialists make sure the campaign is feasible and well executed. This ensures the right experts support the deal at every stage with no delays or handover issues.
“Automations are also triggered when a deal is at risk or needs human intervention. If certain criteria are met, such as a deal exceeding commercial thresholds, it triggers an approval workflow for a senior stakeholder to check. It also generates notifications for someone to review and check if key fields are incomplete, timelines are at risk, or pricing falls outside of agreed parameters,” explained Mercer. “Another example is when we’ve sent a proposal to an advertiser, but nothing’s happened in a specific timeframe. That sends a notification to the whole channel for someone to take a look, which is better than manually emailing a colleague who may not be able to respond right away.”
User-friendly connectors unlock deeper insights
The FT used the Slack Connector for project management tool monday.com to help sales reps track deals and focus on proactive, rather than reactive, delivery. Leveraging artificial intelligence, information such as upcoming tasks, completed actions, and risks is extracted from monday.com and displayed in Slack.
“Slack Connectors have been game-changing for deal visibility and having more informed conversations,” said John. “Sales reps take more accountability, digging deeper to find out why deals aren’t progressing faster and to understand where we are with our campaigns.”
Staff can also decide which Connectors to install from the Slack Marketplace, personalizing their workspace with the tools that add the most value for them. Popular connectors include Gmail, Google Calendar, Workday, and Jira.
“Slack Connectors are game-changing for unlocking deeper visibility of deals and supporting more informed conversations.”
Building new skills with in-house training and Slack support
To ensure successful implementation, the FT stayed close to the sales team to understand their pain points and provide basic training.
“We’re in the first year of the implementation and the sales team can see the benefits of working in Slack. They like having central visibility and a systemic workflow,” said John. “At first, some people found the number of channels overwhelming, so we made sure 101 training included how to mute channels and personalize the workspace.”
Now, staff are asking for more advanced training and want to explore new features. The FT is using this feedback to inform its features roadmap, positioning Slack as its core collaboration platform. The FT also works closely with the Slack team, communicating in a dedicated channel to ask questions and get fast responses.
“The Slack team is great. They listen to our ideas and give us honest answers. If they don’t think we’re looking at the right features for our goals, they’ll tell us,” John added. “We have a wealth of knowledge in our Slack support channel, and a sandbox if we want to try things out.”
“The Slack team gives us great support. They answer our questions in a dedicated channel, building a wealth of technical knowledge we can refer to.”
What’s next
Getting smarter with AI and building repeatable frameworks for success
The FT is currently testing AI agents within Slack channels. Early use cases include generating summaries and using emojis to trigger workflows. “We’ve done a lot of work on centralizing data, so we’re in a good position to start looking at AI agents and how they could help people,” Mercer explained.
The organization is also continuing its plans to consolidate and integrate systems with Slack to give sales teams one central control panel. “We want to be able to do everything in one place, reducing technical friction and giving staff full visibility of deals,” said Mercer. “That includes embedding the Slack UI into Salesforce and possibly connecting more business intelligence and data tools in the future.”
Meanwhile, the success of the implementation has caught the attention of other teams across the business.
“Combining great insights with clear communication is really powerful, and we’ve been giving demos to other departments,” confirmed John. “I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved. With everything we’ve learned, we could roll Slack out to other teams in weeks, not months. It feels great to connect the dots between technology and our business goals, embedding new ways of working that will put the FT at the forefront of innovation in the media sector.”
