Close deals faster with a powerful Sales Cloud and Slack solution

With hiring freezes widespread, capital expensive and GDP growth flat, leaders everywhere are looking for ways to promote efficient growth while dramatically cutting costs. We hear you. Today at the Salesforce World Tour NYC, we’reannouncing new Salesforce and Slack productivity solutions to help organisations to grow revenue – faster and at scale – while saving costs.

A Sales Productivity Bundle will immediately become available to helps customers automate work to drive efficient growth and give sales teams a consistent way to work as a team, connected to all their systems, data and customers. And even better: we’ll be previewing a powerful new solution that will supercharge a salesperson’s ability to close deals quickly. Powered by Salesforce Customer 360 and available early next year, the Sales Cloud and Slack solution will bring critical insights and scalable automation together with the people who can act on them.

The way that sales teams have historically operated is inefficient. Stakeholders aren’t aligned, because they often work in siloed teams; decisions are made based on stale pipeline data; new hires spend weeks trying to get properly onboarded, etc. These inefficiencies are exacerbated by the fact that teams don’t have a centralised workplace where they can get their work done. In fact, Salesforce’s new State of Sales Report found that reps spend only 28% of their week selling, and 66% say that they’re overwhelmed by using too many sales tools. The solution? Unifying teams in Slack, where sales reps can access all their tools, data and even their customers without effort and unending back-and-forth.

‘Sales teams are the backbone of an organisation’s growth, and revenue strategies are now squarely focused on sales productivity and process efficiency,’ says Rob Seaman, Slack’s SVP of Product Management. ‘The future of selling is connecting the right people with the right information, all in one digital workspace. This ultimately empowers sales reps to close deals and resolve issues faster, and – most importantly – cultivate thriving, long-term customer relationships.’

Speed up the sales cycle by making real-time insights accessible to everyone in your workspace

Closing deals is a team effort. Sales reps often rely on other departments – legal, product, procurement – to get answers and approve contracts. But deals can get bogged down in disjointed email strings when people aren’t working together in a centralised space. Stakeholders lack context and access to information being shared, which can lead to misalignment and delays in decision-making.

To collaborate and close deals faster, our new solution connects sellers and cross-functional stakeholders to the single source of truth that they need in Slack. It does this by automating the push and pull of real-time CRM data from Sales Cloud directly into Slack channels (and, in the future, into an account-planning canvas embedded in a channel). Account teams can see opportunities and customer details piped into channels dedicated to a specific customer account – and all the information is visible to people working on the account.

Users can also send account updates from Sales Cloud into Slack channels, where reps can work together on the next steps. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update the CRM with account details with built-in slash commands. Say goodbye to out-of-date data and hello to more transparency and accountability across the board.

In addition, our solution lets you analyse engagement metrics and insights measuring Slack’s effect on helping teams to achieve their sales goals. Leaders can learn and act on these insights to continually optimise work processes over time.

Simplify operations by employing strategic, out-of-the-box features where you need them

The new solution has a gallery of out-of-the-box templates that teams can use from day one. These templates let you create a workplace with clean sidebar sections, easy-to-navigate channels and time-saving automations that fit your teams’ specific needs. Best of all, they work in partnership with best-practice workflows.

For example, an onboarding template allows you to add workflows that trigger as soon as your new hire gets added to Slack. This template can include a canvas with an onboarding message and links to welcome videos, and a workflow can automatically add them to the channels that they need to access. Another workflow can prompt them to complete specific tasks, such as filling out HR forms and reading onboarding materials. By using standardised templates, you can quickly implement processes that modern sales teams use to be successful.

Slack is deepening its integrations with the rest of Salesforce’s products so that our customers can do more work with less effort. Our productivity solutions allow sales operations to organise sales teams so that they can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time contributing to their business’s bottom line.

With Slack and Salesforce, build the resilient and high-performing environment that your sales team needs to thrive. Look for the release of our new solution early next year, and start maximising savings by using our Sales Productivity Bundle now with Slack to deliver success.

The preceding information is intended for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, and not as a binding commitment. Please do not rely on this information when making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack, and are subject to change.