Your complete guide to launching Slack Sales Elevate

 

Sales Elevate combines the power of Sales Cloud and Slack to drive return on investment through time savings, healthier pipelines and aligned team-selling processes. Why is this needed? According to the most recent Salesforce State of Sales Report, most reps are spending only 28% of their week actually selling. Bogged down by administrative tasks, they spend less time with customers and take longer to close deals. As an admin, by investing this time to set up Sales Elevate, you are enabling your sales team to focus on what they do best: sell, and therefore drive revenue for your organization.

This article will walk you through the four phases of launching Sales Elevate to your sales org:

1. Technical setup
2. Use-case definition
3. Best practices
4. Launch

Each phase will require you to bring together different stakeholders within your organization to ensure success. Overall, you will need to assign the following roles:

• Executive sponsor: Sales leader
• Core project team: Project manager, solution owner, Salesforce admin, sales enablement partner(s), change-management/communications owner
• Subject-matter experts/champions: Functional experts for questions and escalations
• Admins and technical leads: Salesforce admin(s), Slack admin(s)

Now is a great time to create a dedicated channel, such as #proj-launch-sales-elevate, for these stakeholders to collaborate in one place. Use a canvas to note the stakeholders and their role.

Phase 1: Technical setup

Here you’ll find the resources you need to configure Slack Sales Elevate, including connecting it to your Salesforce org. We estimate the work covered in this section will take 2-3 hours to complete.

💡 What you’ll learn

• The process of configuring Sales Elevate
• Settings and configurations required for your Salesforce org
• How to provision Sales Elevate users

👤 Who you’ll need

• Slack admin
• Salesforce admin

📚 Resources

• Sales Elevate admin setup guide: A downloadable guide on configuring Elevate
• Slack Certified Sales Elevate admin e-learning: Our most comprehensive step-by-step guide;
  • Tip: If this is your first time accessing Slack e-learning, you will need to sign up for a free account here to access the course
• Sales Elevate admin webinar: A webinar built just for you on what to expect as you prepare to roll out Sales Elevate to your sales team

 

Stuck? We’re here to help. Reach out to us by submitting your case online.

Phase 2: Use-case definition

With the technical configuration complete ✅, it’s time to bring your project team together to define your use cases for Sales Elevate. Consider prioritizing those that will be most impactful for launch, and continue to add them as your team’s use of Slack matures. With the resources below as your guide, this should take 1-2 hours to complete.

💡 What you’ll learn

• Understand stakeholders across your organization
• Define use cases by personas
• How to set up key use cases in your Slack environment

👤 Who you’ll need

• Core project team

📚 Resources

• Essential admin actions to set your sales team up for success: Make your team more productive by setting up notifications on their behalf based on your org’s top use cases
• Set up opportunity lists and configure custom notifications: Step-by-step instructions on setting up Sales Elevate on behalf of your sales team
• Personas and use cases: Understanding who your stakeholders are and how Sales Elevate can benefit them

Phase 3: Best practices

Tried-and-true ways to leverage Slack features to best support your sales team. Read up on these best practices, align with your stakeholders on how to implement them, and set them up in Slack. We estimate this phase will take 4-6 hours to complete.

💡 What you’ll learn

• Ways Slack can help your team boost productivity, close deals faster and win as a team
• Slack tools to measure engagement and drive adoption

👤 Who you’ll need

• Executive sponsor
• Subject-matter experts
• Sales enablement partners

📚 Resources

• Slack for sales: A how-to guide for maximizing time spent on deals and shortening sales cycles with Slack
• Slack for customer success: A how-to guide for building stronger customer relationships and achieving faster response times to customer requests
• Use Slack analytics to drive adoption and engagement (e-learning): How to measure the value of Slack within your organization

Phase 4: Launch

You’ve done the work and now it’s almost go time! Prepare to communicate with and enable your sales org on their new way of working and the benefits of these changes. Now is a great time to set up an #announcements-sales channel with limited posting permissions for these important updates to be shared in. With our pre-recorded videos and templated comms, our hope is that this will take under 2 hours to complete.

💡 What you’ll learn

• Templates for communicating the launch of Sales Elevate
• Enablement materials to ensure users feel confident in setting up and using their Sales Elevate

👤 Who you’ll need

• Executive sponsor
• Sales enablement partner(s)
• Change-management/communications owner

📚 Resources

• Slack Workshop 101: For those who are entirely new to Slack, share this video training first
• Comms templates with enablement resources: Customize these templates to reflect your organization’s sales goals, and tap both your executive sponsor and comms owners to share them out
• How to use Sales Elevate: A quick guide on setting up and using Sales Elevate to share with your users alongside the video below
• Getting started with Sales Elevate (video): A 20-minute video training with everything users need to start selling in Slack

You did it—you’ve launched! 🚀