Dreamforce customer spotlight: How Grammarly is writing the future with Slack

Communicating effectively at work has never been so important—or difficult. From staying on top of countless documents and emails to responding in multiple channels, even the most proficient communicators find it challenging to stay productive. And if you’re a company trying to engage with your customers and employees, crafting compelling content and landing your messages in just the right way are paramount. That’s where Grammarly comes in.

Grammarly provides comprehensive AI writing assistance wherever customers work, across more than 500,000 apps and websites. From initiating a first draft to quickly ticking through emails, Grammarly helps over 30 million people and 50,000 teams at enterprises and organizations worldwide get their point across—and get results—without compromising security.

Behind the scenes, Grammarly harnesses the power of Slack to help drive customer success. At Dreamforce 2023, leaders from Grammarly will share how they use Slack to streamline task automation and unlock unparalleled productivity potential in the session Close the Sales & Marketing Gap with Slack & Marketing Cloud.

Accelerating lead alignment with speedy teamwork

At Grammarly, acting on a lead begins in Slack channels. A channel is a single unified, searchable place for teammates to share messages, files and key decisions on dedicated projects, topics and processes.

Teammates across sales, customer success, product management and marketing can collaborate in a single channel to act fast. Unlike email or messaging apps, which isolate conversations to the recipients, everyone in a channel sees the same conversations.

Every sales professional knows that the time it takes to follow up on a lead can make or break a deal. That’s why Grammarly’s sales agents automate administrative tasks with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement app for Slack.

This integration sends automated alerts about newly qualified leads and partner opportunities to where employees are already working: Slack channels. Cross-functional teammates from the sales, marketing and customer success teams immediately receive notifications and can ask follow-up questions directly in designated Slack channels.

The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement app also uses AI to identify key accounts with the highest likelihood to purchase. When a new lead comes in from a key account, it’s automatically shared in a Slack channel between the marketing and customer success teams.

“We use Slack to plug and prevent the infamous ‘leaky funnel,’ ” Meador says. “At Grammarly, everyone on the sales and marketing teams must turn on the Slack Salesforce app and set up their Salesforce notifications within Slack. This is a must-have with all new hires during onboarding.”

Since adopting Slack and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Grammarly’s speed to lead opportunity conversion time has improved from between 60 and 90 days to just 30 days on average.

Streamlining internal and external collaboration

As Grammarly continues to innovate as a leader in AI, it also hosts informational webinars to answer customer questions, provide industry guidance, and generate leads. Slack plays a key role throughout the webinar planning process.

Colleagues across the marketing and sales teams work together in Slack channels to organize the webinar and share reports once the event ends. This fast and organized communication in channels helps save Grammarly’s teams stress and lost productivity.

“Our most critical initiatives have a lot of cross-collaboration between teams,” Meador says. “Some of our top use cases for dedicated Slack channels are key account alignment and webinar handoffs between marketing and sales.”

All of Slack’s time-saving tools and features extend to external partners using Slack Connect. Grammarly uses more than 120 Slack Connect channels to securely collaborate with external partners, agencies and vendors. By moving conversations out of siloed email threads, Slack Connect brings together all the right internal and external teammates for easy, transparent communication.

“Grammarly operates with a remote-first hybrid model, so not all of us—or our partners and contractors—are in the same time zone or even the same country,” says Jacqueline Freedman, a manager of marketing operations at Grammarly.

Grammarly put Slack Connect to good use while producing a recent research report that explores the business impacts of ineffective communication. The annual study, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll, shows that poor workplace communication is a pervasive problem, already costing U.S. companies up to $1.2 trillion every year. Grammarly worked with its partners at an external creative agency to design and publish the report.

“Slack Connect makes it possible for us to all be on the same page so we can quickly and efficiently collaborate on key projects,” says Freedman.

Working smarter with automations and integrations

Slack has integrations with more than 2,600 software tools and custom apps, allowing all work to be done on one productivity platform. Grammarly employees use Slack integrations for everything from coordinating Zoom meetings to managing projects with Asana.

Teams across Grammarly regularly use time-saving Slack features, including a custom app that seamlessly integrates with Slack’s platform. This app allows sales agents to easily upgrade an account and generate a user code within Slack in just minutes.

Teammates rely on Slack’s schedule send feature when collaborating across time zones. Employees draft a message but delay the sending until a time that’s within business hours for the recipient.

Accessing and acting on data insights across every line of business is a snap, thanks to Slack’s deep integrations with Salesforce’s Customer 360 solutions. Grammarly’s marketing teams can make more informed decisions with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the Tableau integration for Slack.

The marketing department has weekly top-of-funnel meetings powered by Tableau data and insights. At these meetings, marketers can view and act on critical data, like the current number and origins of qualified leads.

Powering the future of the AI-connected workplace

Grammarly has already been delivering trusted AI writing assistance for over 14 years, and now the company is expanding its vision to power the AI-connected enterprise. With the release of its generative AI features, Grammarly has gone beyond supporting customers in the revision stage of writing to helping businesses transform how work gets done.

A recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Grammarly found that generative AI use:

• Increases revenue (74%)
• Improves customer satisfaction (77%)
• Enhances the employee experience (79%)
• Saves about 13 hours every workweek

As Grammarly continues to innovate with AI, Slack plays a supporting role in this growth. The company is exploring additional ways to expand its usage of Slack and its advanced AI features in the future.

“With the help of Slack in our productivity toolkit, we’re confident we can continue to meet the growing demand we’re seeing from our customers,” says Freedman.

Slack is Grammarly’s productivity platform for organizing communication, aligning on leads, and automating away routine tasks. All that smooth collaboration and creativity behind the scenes translates to an elevated customer experience.

Don’t miss Grammarly’s session at Dreamforce 2023! Sign up to attend Close the Sales & Marketing Gap with Slack & Marketing Cloud on September 14 in person or virtually on Salesforce+.