Level up your sales game with Slack

Time kills all deals, as the saying goes. As a sales leader, you want to remove roadblocks that prevent you and your team from hitting their goals as quickly as possible. Time-eating culprits include disparate conversations around sales deals across multiple channels, inaccurate record data‌ and duplicative manual tasks managed in several software tools. A study from Salesforce found that organisations use an average of 10 tools to close deals. The cost of this sprawl is high: sales reps spend only 28% of their time actually selling. All this bloat and context switching adds up.

Sales leaders, we’ve heard you, and we’re here to streamline day-to-day operations so that you can focus your time on the high-value activities that matter most. In 2023, we launched Slack Sales Elevate for sales teams, an essential tool to help sellers save time and close deals faster together by bringing your people, processes, apps and real-time CRM data from Salesforce Sales Cloud into the flow of work in Slack.

Today, we’re expanding on that launch with a powerful new sales leader experience – a set of views that bring real-time, actionable visibility about your team’s deals and performance into Slack. These sales leader views will allow you to track key metrics, get notified of deal progression, review pipeline changes and easily manage Sales Cloud records, so you can forecast confidently, make smarter decisions and move deals forwards faster. Here’s how.

 

1. Keep deals on track with real-time visibility

One of the biggest challenges that sales leaders face is being able to keep track of their business in real time. Their CRM says one thing, but the teams say another. On top of that, conversations related to the account are fragmented across various emails, phone calls, texts and Slack messages. How can you get an accurate picture?

Sales Elevate’s Sales Home is a workspace in Slack designed to solve just that. Connected to your Salesforce CRM data, it surfaces key performance metrics, account records and helpful deal notifications all in one place, so you can follow your sellers’ progress and, early on, spot opportunities or obstacles to closing a deal. 

Whether you’re in the office or on the go, you’ll have the same seamless experience on your mobile device. So instead of having to wait for the next team call to get details on deal progress, new deal insight notifications proactively deliver daily or weekly digests of won or lost deals, or deals that had changes to their value or close dates. Staying up to speed on deal movements and preparing for your forecasts has never been this easy. 

In addition, a complete overview of your organisation’s pipeline shows you where you need to take action without needing to click through dozens of tabs. Pipeline view helps you to review and manage your team’s Sales Cloud opportunities and pipeline in a single view. You can quickly drill down on a specific deal to review the record details from Salesforce and then immediately jump into the account channel in Slack to strategise on how to move things forwards. You’re going from deal information to Slack conversation in two seconds flat, without switching systems.

Need to go deeper into the data immediately, during a meeting with your leadership team, for example? Deal filters help you to sort or group opportunities by ‌account owner or forecast category so you can quickly identify opportunities that can move the needle – such as deals that can be pulled in by quarter – and dig into the conversation in Slack channels to help your team get the deal to the finishing line. 

Of course, your data accuracy is only as good as what your teams are reporting. Sales Elevate removes the friction for reps to manage their pipeline in Slack. Thanks to opportunity lists, reps can access and edit their deals in seconds, and these updates sync with Sales Cloud in real time, reducing CRM admin time by 53%. 

It’s a win for both you and your sellers. Sellers get more time back to support their customers, and you get more visibility into the business data that you rely on to make better decisions, faster. And it all happens directly where you and your team are already working: in Slack.

2. Accelerate deals with automation and generative AI

AI is getting a lot of attention these days – and for good reason. Automation and AI bring a whole new level of efficiency to sales orgs. 

Streamline your operations by automating processes with workflows

As a sales leader, you need to know immediately when important deals get off track. However, you probably don’t have time to check in with every single account. Sales Elevate workflows do the heavy lifting for you so that you can focus your time on deeper, more strategic work. 

Sales Elevate’s out-of-the-box workflows include automations that help to keep your deals moving. For example, if a deal has stalled, you’ll get an alert so that you can take action straight away. Reps can also trigger workflows to request deal support or ‌approvals, which saves them valuable time chasing down resources. With everything shared in a Slack channel, it helps everyone to stay on the same page and reduces the amount of time that people spend switching between apps. 

Get the most from your collective data with Slack AI

Consider this scenario: You’re at a conference halfway across the world, working in another time zone from your team, but you need to get a summary of what’s been happening with a specific account – and you need to find a subject-matter expert working on the project, ASAP. What do you do? 

In the past, you may have rifled through your Slack channels and direct messages and had to read through several briefs, notes and emails until you found what you needed. Now sales leaders rely on Slack AI.

Slack AI can help you to save time that you’d normally spend trying to find the answers you need by summarising conversations in seconds. Slack AI’s features for sales leaders include: 

• Search answers, to help you instantly find relevant answers from data in Slack when you ask questions using natural language, rather than just a general list of results
• Conversation summaries, which let you catch up on messages in one click, generating key highlights from your channels and threads
• Recaps, to deliver a personalised daily digest of what’s happening in your most important channels, so you can spend less time catching up and more time on your highest-priority work 

Once you try Slack AI, I know it will be something that you won’t want to live without. Businesses of all sizes are already saving an average of 97 minutes per user each week.

3. Standardise and scale your team’s winning strategies 

A great leader finds ways to help their teams to develop and grow. Building a high-performing sales team means being able to capture the things that your team does best and standardise them across your organisation. Coming this summer, Slack Sales Elevate’s sales templates will help you to replicate and scale your team’s winning strategies, turning every AE into an MVP. 

Sellers can use these templates to automate the time-consuming process of building an account plan, mutual close plan‌ or executive brief from scratch. The templates are ready to use out of the box or can be customised to reflect your team’s best practices. They can automatically pull in relevant data from Salesforce, removing admin work for your busy sellers. The best part is that everything you build with sales templates is accessible directly in your Slack channels. 

Additionally, teams will be able to track all deliverables, owners, due dates and more for customer meeting prep, deal approvals and close plans – in a Slack List. Lists is a new feature available this summer that lets you structure information in Slack so that you can manage all types of work, from cross-functional projects to inbound requests. Embed Lists into your sales templates to bring more organisation and accountability to your team’s work, and automatically pull in your data from third-party apps in a List to streamline your work. 

Later this year, we’re supercharging the channels that you’re already using by rolling out Record channels. These are Slack channels that map to Salesforce records. When a rep creates a new opportunity in Salesforce, all the details of the record can automatically get added to a corresponding Slack channel that has all the team members working on the deal. When reps log activities and update the deal’s status, that information is updated both in the channel and in the Salesforce record.

When the deal is closed, the channel archives itself, and the celebrations can begin! Record channels are a game-changer because they bring Sales Cloud and Slack even closer together – the sales data and the selling conversations are available everywhere, improving visibility for the entire account team. By unifying the sales experience, it’s easier than ever to scale successful strategies, share knowledge and collaborate on deal changes in real time, without ever having to leave Slack. 

Transform your sales org with Slack Sales Elevate 

Top sales leaders understand the power of having their teams, processes and CRM data together in one place. When you reduce the amount of time spent searching for information and resources, you and your team can focus on what’s most important: selling. But it doesn’t stop there. Slack makes it simple for you to socialise important updates and access important account information from anywhere, so you can empower your team to be successful.