Emails, blog posts, instant messages, reports: no matter what its customers are writing or where they’re working, Grammarly is there to help them communicate quickly and effectively.
Grammarly is the world’s leading AI writing assistance company, helping over 30 million people and 50,000 professional teams work faster and smarter every day. As a forerunner in AI-enabled communication, Grammarly understands the importance of efficient communication in the workplace. So when it was looking for a productivity platform to help team members communicate seamlessly and automate routine tasks, Slack seemed like the perfect fit.
“We are a Slack-heavy organization. Nearly all of our comms go through Slack. We use it for project planning and for communication between many different groups,” says Kelli Meador, senior manager of marketing operations at Grammarly.
Let’s take a look at how Grammarly has rewritten its communication strategy with Slack.
Improving lead alignment between marketing and sales
Grammarly’s marketing team uses dedicated Slack channels to align on leads in real time. Marketing works with other teams, like sales, customer success and product management, to act on leads faster.
Grammarly also uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and integrates Salesforce products like Tableau and Account Engagement into Slack.
Tableau gives Grammarly access to valuable data and AI predictions to help the team make informed decisions. The marketing department has weekly top-of-funnel meetings powered by the data and insights from Tableau. At these meetings, they’re able to see how many MQLs came in and where they came from.
“We use Tableau within Slack as well. So if there is a question about data, we can send the chart right from Tableau into Slack and start a discussion there, which is awesome,” Meador says.
Using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Grammarly can leverage AI to identify key accounts with the highest likelihood to purchase. When a new lead comes in from a key account, it’s automatically shared in a Slack channel between the marketing and customer success teams, empowering everyone to respond quickly.
With the combined power of Slack and Salesforce, Grammarly’s speed to lead opportunity conversion has improved from between 60 and 90 days to just 30 days on average.
“Our marketing and sales teams have seen better alignment and increased efficiency in lead management and our speed to lead quotas.”
Boosting internal and external collaboration
Slack helps Grammarly team members collaborate efficiently with each other and with external vendors and partners. With over 1,000 public channels, employees can chat instantaneously and complete projects faster.
The marketing department uses Slack for their webinar management before, during and after a webinar takes place. Marketing and sales team members work together in Slack to ensure that the webinar is ready to go and to collaborate on reporting when it’s over.
“Our most critical initiatives have a lot of cross-collaboration between teams,” Meador says. “We add all of our team players to the project Slack channel. Some of our top use cases for dedicated Slack channels are key account alignment and webinar handoffs between marketing and sales.”
Slack Connect allows the Grammarly team to communicate securely with external partners, agencies, and vendors, with more than 120 Slack Connect channels.
“Not only is Slack instrumental for our internal communications and collaboration, it is our lifeline to asynchronous work with external partners and agencies via Slack Connect.”
For example, Grammarly recently collaborated with an external creative agency over Slack Connect throughout the process of design and publishing a research report that explores the business impacts of ineffective communication. The annual study, conducted in partnership with the Harris Poll, shows that poor workplace communication already costs U.S. companies up to $1.2 trillion every year.
“Grammarly operates with a remote-first hybrid model,” Freedman says. “And so not all of us—or our partners and contractors—are in the same time zone or even the same country. We know from our study with the Harris Poll that miscommunication at work is an incredibly costly and growing issue, and using Slack helps contribute to our own team’s ability to communicate efficiently.”
Making work easier with integrations and automation
Grammarly team members use Slack integrations to do everything from taking video calls over Zoom to ordering food through third-party apps. Slack integrates with more than 2,600 apps, minimizing the need to toggle between tabs to accomplish different tasks.
“I love the interconnectedness of Slack,” Meador says. “I have my Asana set up there. I have my personal apps, like our meal service. So when I’m in the office and ordering lunch, it will send me a Slack message telling me my lunch is ready in the cafeteria.”
Grammarly team members use Slack’s “schedule send” feature to schedule messages to global colleagues at times more convenient for them. They can draft the message when they’re ready, but then delay the sending to a time that’s within business hours for the other person. Similarly, Slack’s “save for later” feature allows team members to save important messages or files that they want to remember to return to later.
Slack’s automation features, such as bots, also help the team stay productive and connected. Grammarly has a global team across North America and Europe, and they have a bot set up to inform team members of important company updates.
Emoji help Grammarly team members express themselves from behind their screens, too. Freedman says, “Particularly in a remote-first world where we’re working more asynchronously, sometimes your emotion and tone don’t come across in the intended way. This is a challenge we care about deeply at Grammarly in helping our customers get across their messages in just the way they want, and tools like Slack emoji can really help. You can also customize your emoji and upload your own, so the options are endless.”
Continuing to expand as a leader in AI
Grammarly has delivered trusted AI writing assistance for over 14 years, and now the company looks to go beyond words to power the AI-connected workplace. The release of generative AI features this year expanded Grammarly’s ability to support its customers well beyond the revision stage of writing that it’s known for.
As Grammarly continues to grow and innovate with AI, its focus on enabling people and businesses to get better results through better communication will not change. With a little help from Slack, it is empowered to do just that.
