The digital landscape is always evolving and, unfortunately, so are the consequences of emerging cybersecurity threats. The good news is that companies like Snyk exist to counter bad actors putting digital infrastructure at risk.
Snyk is a developer security platform that keeps the working world safer. By integrating directly into development tools, workflows, and automation pipelines, Snyk helps developers to quickly find and mitigate security vulnerabilities in code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code.
Snyk operates in a market saturated with well-established competitors. Not only that, but the company is experiencing fleet-footed expansion, underscoring a need to streamline its internal processes to optimize onboarding, communication, sales, and other key business functions.
To maintain this momentum, Snyk taps into the power of Slack to seamlessly facilitate its expansion — all with the friction-free agility needed to capture new markets and scale sustainably.
“We’re a geographically distributed company, so Slack is essential for day-to-day tasks, from software development to closing deals.”
Slack Sales Elevate powers centralized collaboration and rapid sales cycles
By employee count, sales is the largest function at Snyk. But as the company began supercharging growth initiatives, the sales team required more robust support to optimize its daily tasks.
That’s why Snyk brought Slack Sales Elevate into the fold. Sales Elevate integrates Sales Cloud with Slack, funneling real-time CRM data directly into sales reps’ Slack workspaces.
By marrying CRM data with conversations happening in Slack, Sales Elevate empowers sales teams to act on real-time data, collaborate more efficiently, and close deals faster. With a holistic, 360-degree view of their Salesforce accounts, opportunities, and key metrics in Slack, reps as well as their managers can maintain visibility and make faster decisions through every step of a deal without constantly toggling between platforms.
With Sales Elevate, Snyk sales reps can monitor deal changes and quickly take action thanks to real-time notifications and alerts, whether they’re at their desks or on the go. Sakin said the sales team also uses Sales Elevate to create automated custom notifications, like changes to deal stage or deal size, which streamline processes and enable faster sales cycles. Now sales team members don’t need to chase down deal updates and can use their time for more impactful work.
Because of the easy adoption of Sales Elevate by the Sales team, Snyk recently expanded automating processes in Slack to its sales engineers and customer success managers. The team uses Workflow Builder to automatically create a new channel when a deal closes over a certain revenue threshold to help streamline the post-sale transition. That automation reduces the need for team members to spend time on administrative tasks and helps drive better visibility across the broader account team.
Salesforce channels put customer data at the heart of collaboration
Snyk stays on the leading edge of breakthrough technologies — which is why the company was one of Slack’s pilot program customers for Salesforce channels. Salesforce channels are channels built in Slack that will soon be available directly in Salesforce. They bridge CRM data with conversations happening in Slack, enabling Snyk’s globally distributed sales teams to stay 100% aligned and deliver a consistent, quality customer experience with stronger visibility and collaboration capabilities.
Using Salesforce channels, Snyk instantly has access to a centralized place for account teams to collaborate, informed by real-time customer data. That means that account teams spanning regions and functions have a single place to seamlessly progress deals and work together in support of their customers, with their discussions and decisions automatically tied to the customer data.
“We have deal channels where people discuss customer accounts, including the customer success managers involved,” explained Sakin. “These channels are integrated with our CRM, which means discussions are connected to real-time opportunities. If we want to set up an automation to alert us about changes in a deal in Salesforce, we know exactly which channel to reference.”
With customer information accessible from within the conversation, team members can focus on serving their customers without constantly context switching or reconciling data between channels and the Salesforce platform. “The ability for teams to work together efficiently with conversations grounded in customer data is a game changer and an incredible advantage for our business,” said Sakin. “By being able to stay better aligned around the customer, our teams will be able to deliver more value for customers.”
Snyk has bold visions for the future of Salesforce channels. By formalizing collaboration and leveraging workflow automation and sales templates in Salesforce channels that are created as deals become qualified, Snyk is eager to scale best practices and get ahead of how teams work together on deals.
“Slack AI allows us to effectively leverage historical knowledge, enabling our employees to find answers faster and make informed decisions — which is essential for maintaining our competitive edge.”
Snyk works smarter with Slack AI
Matt Jarvis is Snyk’s Director of AI Operations. He leads initiatives exploring how Snyk can leverage generative AI to improve internal efficiency. In the past several months, Jarvis has used Slack AI to bolster Snyk’s own AI initiatives.
Slack AI seamlessly integrates generative AI features directly within any Slack environment. With intuitive AI guidance, users benefit from automated channel recaps, detailed answers to questions, and important recaps for when you’ve been out of the office or missed a meeting.
Jarvis said Slack AI’s recap function is one of the most used in the company. AI-generated recaps summarize activity in busy channels, like those related to big deals or fast-moving projects, where the conversation moves quickly and vital information can get lost. This function proves especially valuable to the executive team.
“If we think about our executive team, they need to be able to join a channel and get a clear sense of what’s happening,” said Jarvis. “Historically, that could be extremely difficult, given that it would involve lots of threads in a single channel — especially if that channel is fast-moving. The ability to summarize the activity in the channel enables them to have the full context, allowing them to make better decisions, faster.”
Ultimately, Jarvis said, Slack AI makes work easier for employees and customers alike. With the company’s collective intelligence available with the click of a button, delivering swift, accurate information to prospects and customers is seamless. “Through our entire AI program, it’s much easier and faster to find answers,” he said. “It allows us to better serve our customers, and drive better business outcomes on the whole.”
Integrations and automations catalyze rapid scale-up
With a fast-growing company like Snyk, integrations are a critical tool for maintaining momentum and empowering transformation at scale. The company has integrated many business applications into Slack, ranging from off-the-shelf tools like Workday to custom-built solutions for posting application metrics and automating content publication.
Sakin noted that Slack’s Jira integration has had a direct impact on Snyk’s expansion. “It enabled us to grow from a small company that does all their support on Slack — like any startup would do today — to a proper enterprise-level ticketing system, where I have reporting, ticket deflection, SLAs, and ticket statuses, without having to change the experience for the end users,” he said. Now, instead of just posting questions in channels, employees go through a workflow that opens a ticket directly in Slack.
Building automated workflows in Slack has also translated to efficiency improvements. With no coding required, Snyk is driving efficiency by automating routine processes like escalating support requests — or even asking the product team a question. The result? About 8,300 hours saved per month.
We know the digital world is safer in Snyk’s hands, and we’re proud to be helping the company expand its impact. “Slack isn’t just a communication tool anymore,” Sakin said. “It’s where work gets done.”
