Speed up work with external partners using these apps for Slack Connect

Whether you’re an enterprise sales rep based in London or a soybean farmer in rural America, you rely on partners outside your business to help get work done. For the sales rep, it’s all your prospects, suppliers and customers. For the farmer? It’s buyers, along with a host of logistics and delivery vendors.

Market research firm IDC found that 43% of workers reported “difficulty collaborating with external stakeholders” as the top challenge in their day-to-day work. Slack Connect helps solve this.

With Slack Connect, you can:

• Collaborate with up to 20 external orgs via channels
• Directly message anyone, inside or outside your organization, in real time
• Simplify working with outside partners by bringing them and your tools into the channels you share

The latter helps you skip the back-and-forth that often comes with incompatible tools, streamlining processes and how information gets shared. Scores of apps have been updated to work in Slack Connect. Here are four of our favorites featuring new functionality designed to foster easier collaboration between organizations.

Skip the scheduling back-and-forth with Calendly

Aligning schedules with others—especially across multiple organizations— can be a nightmare: requests for time slots, waiting for email replies, cross-referencing multiple calendar systems. Calendly helps you schedule your meetings by offering others a range of easy choices instead. And now you can use the app in Slack Connect DMs and channels. Just share a link for others to grab time from your calendar, and your work is done, allowing you to focus on more important tasks.

Install

Use the Calendly app for Slack to:

• Access and share your Calendly links without leaving Slack
• Give others a one-click way to pick a meeting time
• Add personal messages with added context of possible agendas

Discover joint opportunities with Crossbeam

Crossbeam helps companies work together to find overlapping customers. It’s a natural fit in Slack Connect, where go-to-market teams from multiple organizations formulate their joint sales strategy. When an overlapping customer, opportunity or lead gets matched between your org and a partner org, the Crossbeam app pipes an alert into a Slack Connect channel, where it’s easy to discuss and kick off next steps.

Install

Use the Crossbeam app for Slack to:

• Be notified in-channel each time a new shared opportunity arises
• Search for overlapping accounts on demand, using a /crossbeam command
• Find out who owns your target accounts at partner companies

Uplevel your customer support with Halp

Many of our customers use Slack Connect to provide white-glove support for their biggest clients. In those shared spaces, account reps need to capture feedback and any issues clients are having with the product. Halp is a ticketing platform built for Slack, and it’s a perfect fit in these scenarios. With Halp, you can use a simple emoji to turn any Slack message into a trackable ticket in your system, getting more of the right team’s eyes on those requests, right away.

Halp’s easy-to-use, powerful app, combined with the speed of communication in Slack channels, reduces resolution time and lets agents provide seamless, premium support to their highest priority customers, allowing both internal teams and external partners to weigh in quickly.

Install

Use the Halp app for Slack to:

• Turn any message from Slack into a trackable ticket by marking it with an emoji
• Automatically route tickets submitted via email to a Slack triage channel to keep your team working in one place
• Add comments in a Slack thread, which syncs with the ticket
• Get notified about ticket updates directly in Slack, whether you submitted the ticket or you’re an agent triaging the request

Share content across companies with Highspot

Your organization likely relies on a primary file management system, like Box or Google Drive, to streamline how content is shared. But for your customers, prospects and partners? That’s a much different story—and it’s why Highspot has quickly become one of the top-rated sales enablement platforms.

Sellers can generate pitch links that drop users into an intuitive browsing experience, without the permissions roadblocks that come with sharing content across different organizations. With the updated Highspot app for Slack (coming May 2021), partners will see rich previews of the content, including a title, thumbnail and a button for instant access, allowing sellers to drive interest in the content before anyone dives in.

Install

Use the Highspot app for Slack to:

• Quickly find relevant content to share with prospects with the /highspot command
• Include rich previews alongside Highspot pitch links, featuring a title, thumbnail and a button to access the content
• Track activity from links shared in Slack Connect channels, including click and pitch activity

To make working with partners in Slack Connect even simpler, check out the full slate of apps. There are options for scheduling, polling, video calls and more, and they’re all designed to make partnering up easier and more streamlined. That means less time spent navigating settings and permissions between incompatible tools, and more time actually working together.