The “Swivel Chair Tax”
Salesforce uses its own CRM as the source of truth and Slack to run the business. Yet, its Sales and Customer Success teams were still paying a “swivel chair tax,” toggling between the two to connect customer data with the decisions being made about it.
While customer records were accurate, when it came to debating deals, resolving exceptions, or aligning on next steps, work happened in Slack. To bridge that gap, people had to constantly pause and shift focus.
Solving this required more than incremental tweaks. Salesforce needed to function as the decision engine behind daily work, extending its data and automation directly into Slack. By bringing that intelligence to where teams already spend most of their work day, Salesforce is enabling faster, more informed decisions across the customer journey.
Sales: Closing deals faster
When selling work gets buried in busywork
On average, sales reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks, slowing down velocity. Sellers at Salesforce felt that friction in familiar places: deal strategy was getting lost in fragmented side conversations, and leaders struggled to get a clear picture of the pipeline without slowing their teams down.
Instead of a mandate to change how sellers work, Salesforce became its own first customer of Salesforce channels, bringing customer data and conversations together so sellers could access the right information, context, and actions in the place they already plan, discuss, and move deals forward. Everyday conversations in Slack became grounded in live Salesforce records.
Data in the flow of work
By bringing Sales Cloud data directly into Slack with Account and Opportunity channels, sellers can now access account records and deal signals where they already plan and discuss work. AI in Slack quickly brings managers up to speed with instant summaries on a deal’s history, while quick actions let sellers update the CRM without toggling between apps.
This ensures everyone is looking at the same real-time view of the customer while keeping the momentum of the deal alive in the conversation.
“People were collaborating. But all of the processes that actually move deals forward weren’t running in the same place as the conversation.”
Unlocking deal momentum as one team
Winning deals doesn’t happen with the core deal team alone. That’s why Salesforce extended Salesforce channels to the cross-functional partners who sit just outside the deal team but play a critical role in closing deals, like Deal Support, Legal, and Sales Operations. By adding support for 10 new record types, including quotes and orders, the entire pipeline now runs in Slack.
“Accounts and opportunities are important, but a lot of work happens at a more granular level,” explained Akshita Saxena, Director of Product Innovation and Architecture. “We saw adoption jump once we expanded beyond the sales team, because that’s when the full pipeline could actually run in Salesforce channels.”
One sales partner, not several tools
Salesforce also simplified high-value prep work by introducing a single point of contact: the Sales Agent. “We made a very intentional decision: If you have a sales-impacting question, you go to the Sales Agent,” Saxena said.
Instead of jumping between tools, Sellers use Agentforce in Slack to generate executive briefs, account POVs, competitive insights, and more in minutes. It meets sellers where they already are, accelerating tasks that used to take hours and keeping the focus on the customer, not the process.
Shortening the distance between pitch and close
With Salesforce built in, Slack is now the natural home for deal work. In an internal survey, sellers reported saving 30% of their time previously spent on manual data retrieval, allowing them to focus on strategy. And with live records and account signals flowing directly into channels, sales managers can stay in the loop without hunting for updates, and the path from pitch to close grew shorter and less bumpy.
“Before, I’d ping reps for updates to see where a deal stood,” says Jaime Widder, RVP of Sales at Salesforce. “Now, I can see a strategy shift in Slack, review the live data, and offer guidance in seconds. It’s changed how we work as a team and how we shape deals in real time.”
“When critical customer signals live right where we’re strategizing on deals as a team, we stop looking for information and go straight to acting on it.”
Customer Success: Staying ahead of customer needs
The cost of scattered information
Customer Success Managers (CSMs) faced a different hurdle: maintaining customer information over time.
CSMs manage Salesforce’s Signature Success customers, providing high-touch support across years of renewals and expansions. “They’re high-end knowledge workers,” Mark Hibbert, Senior Director of Customer Success Operations said. “They partner with sales, delivery, architects, and more teams across the organization to support each customer.”
Success work requires managing long-term engagements where context is everything. Before Salesforce channels, that context wasn’t always connected, and CSMs were toggling between Slack and the CRM 19 times a day to stay on top of what was happening with their customers.
Bringing the full customer into focus
Instead of pushing more alerts, Customer Success focused on the pull. Success Plan channels became that shared space, consolidating context and enabling CSMs to effectively create the best customer experience from one coordinated place.
These long-lived Salesforce channels hold the history, decisions and data that matter most. Directly in Slack, CSMs can view, edit, and create Success Plan insights, keeping their work grounded in the account’s real-time state.
A real turning point came with Related Conversations, which surface case, incident, and renewal discussions alongside the Success Plan. Now, CSMs see every thread of customer support in one view. “That was the aha moment,” Hibbert said. “People now have a rich, contextual hub where they can take immediate action.”
CSM leaders can quickly understand account health using AI summaries in Slack, no meetings or manual updates required. Over time, this shift built an AI-centric, AI-fluent team that defaults to these insights to support each account.
Agentforce for complete customer context
To manage complex relationships, Salesforce also introduced a CSM Agent in Slack.
Grounded in Success Plans and related records, the agent works within Salesforce channels instead of a separate dashboard. CSMs use the agent to pull insights across multiple touchpoints or check customer health scores. Because the agent joins the same channels as the rest of the team, it operates with a shared understanding of the account, making it both intuitive and trustworthy.
“Salesforce channels and Agentforce empower CSMs to finally see the whole customer story, in one place, over time. Nothing important gets lost and there’s no need to reconstruct the story, which leads to a high-quality customer experience, every time.”
One foundation, many outcomes
“Sales and Customer Success were just the start. When you bring people and data together, you see what’s possible for the entire company.”
Sales and Customer Success were solving different problems. Sales needed speed, while Success needed long-term visibility. Both goals were met by moving Salesforce from a destination reps visit to a built-in part of their daily work in Slack.
The key to its impact is flexibility; Salesforce channels adapt to any scenario, from high-touch success management to mid-market deal cycles, without breaking the underlying data model. “We didn’t want to be prescriptive or top-down,” said Andy White, SVP of Business Technology. “A savvy rep is always going to find the tools and technology that support them best. We made adoption feel organic and allowed teams to work in ways that fit their reality.”
That same foundation is what makes Agentforce effective. Because agents are grounded in customer context, like deals or success plans, they join the work ready to help. As White notes, “Channels unlock the speed of Agentforce.”
What Salesforce demonstrated is a practical blueprint for becoming an agentic enterprise: Start with real friction, design for flexibility, and improve the process where work actually happens.
That same approach now guides teams across functions — from PR to HR — with Slack as the place where systems, agents, and people come together to get work done.
