Three strategies for boosting partner sales with Slack

Imagine that you sell a trendy new drink. Your product is a hit within the target market in your home region, and now it’s time to expand. You want to see your drink in restaurants across the UK and in other countries.

The channel sales model is an efficient way to expand your market. With this model, companies partner up with third-party resellers, such as independent retailers, salespeople and service providers, to reach a broader range of customers and close more deals. While third parties – or channel sales partners – earn a commission with each purchase, working with them allows organisations to scale without adding headcount.

Sales partner relationships can increase leads, extend a brand’s influence, attract more customers and accelerate earnings. But many organisations might be missing out on these benefits. If your channel sales partners are juggling tasks across outdated tools and platforms, they’re losing time that they could better spend with your customers.

Learn how using Slack as your intelligent productivity platform makes it easier to grow partner sales by optimising partner engagement, automating partner onboarding and enablement, and building relationships that scale.

Accelerate sales cycles and increase revenue with Slack Sales Elevate

Slack Sales Elevate is an essential tool that sales reps, managers and leaders can use to spend more time with their customers and take sales productivity to new heights. Slack Sales Elevate empowers sales teams to sell together seamlessly and accelerate deals by tapping into rich customer data and business insights from Sales Cloud and Salesforce Customer 360, directly from Slack, bringing business context and depth to team conversations and deal collaborations.

Teams can access Salesforce accounts and opportunity record data in one place, and updates made to that data in Slack are automatically pushed back to Sales Cloud in real time. With automatic, real-time alerts and personalised reminders, sales reps, managers and leaders can easily stay on top of deal movements, team wins and pipeline changes. Better visibility helps sales leaders to keep a pulse on their team’s performance and identify opportunities for coaching and development to keep deals on track.

Bringing data to the place where workers spend most of their time reduces context switching. By surfacing real-time deal information directly in the flow of work, Sales Elevate improves team visibility at every stage of the deal cycle. These benefits – from automated deal alerts to CRM updates – are available from anywhere, on any device.

Internal research across our Slack and Salesforce sales teams showed reps updated their deals twice as fast with Slack Sales Elevate. When teammates are automatically prompted to update sales data – and when this task is fast and painless – reps will update their deals more often. In fact, the same internal research found a 29% increase in users who update opportunities daily. The result is better data quality for more accurate forecasting and a real-time view of the business.

Increase visibility between partners and vendors with Slack Connect

In Slack, work happens in channels. A channel is a single place for a team to share messages, tools and files. Channels can be public (open to everyone at the organisation) or private (invitation only). In addition, organisations on a paid Slack subscription can share a channel with external partners and vendors with Slack Connect.

Once an organisation joins from their own Slack workspace, everyone can share files, loop in colleagues and quickly make decisions, just like they do with internal teams. Having fluid conversations in dedicated, secure Slack channels allows teammates from different organisations to develop solutions together – as if they were part of the same organisation.

Slack Connect increases visibility between your vendors and your partner network. If a partner needs a demo from a vendor to support an ongoing deal, they can quickly get in touch in channels for the information that they need. Channels create a record of all previous conversations and shared files, so there’s no need to waste time sifting for emails in crowded inboxes.

Sharing customer feedback and developing and selling new products with partners has never been easier, thanks to huddles and clips in Slack. These low-lift audio and video collaboration features offer a faster, more human way of connecting – one that allows you to nurture relationships in real time and proactively respond to deal blockers. Say goodbye to disjointed conversations and hello to fluid interactions.

• 4x

  faster deal cycles with Slack Connect*

• 60%

  faster response times from customers with Slack Connect*

• 60%

  time saved in feedback cycle*

Automate onboarding and start selling faster

Setting your channel sales partners up for long-term success begins with onboarding. Slack transforms your partner onboarding and enablement processes through automated workflows and integrated apps.

Workflow Builder, Slack’s no-code tool that assists you with automating work, can help you to ramp up partners quickly – so they can start selling sooner. Create a workflow that directs partners to onboarding channels containing key documents, such as your company’s latest pitch decks and data sheets, so they don’t have to hunt down crucial information. Another workflow can remind new partners to complete specific tasks, such as reviewing contracts or branding guidelines materials and filling in non-disclosure agreements.

By using standardised workflow templates, non-technical users can quickly implement processes that help modern vendors and channel partners to be successful. Automating those simple yet time-consuming tasks frees up more time to focus on customers and selling.

Slack canvases add more value to onboarding channels by providing a permanent place to store your most essential resources and information, so partners can access all the tools and information that help them get up to speed faster. Workflows can be embedded in canvases and channels to complete tasks without ever leaving Slack.

Slack is a productivity platform that’s built to support your organisation as it scales. With channels, automation and the combined power of Slack and Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, you can harness the full power of partner sales. 

*Claims and figures based on specific teams using Slack Connect at their companies. Results may vary at your organisation.