Everything you need to know about Slack at Dreamforce 2022

Jane Goodall, automations, Net Zero Marketplace, Red Hot Chili Peppers, real-time data. These were just some of the high-profile celebrities and topics of discussion on the agenda at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s signature customer and partner event, which this year celebrated its 20th anniversary. And guess who was also making headlines at the biggest annual tech conference in the world? Slack!

Slack showed up to Dreamforce 2022 with an inspiring keynote, exciting product announcements and informative breakout sessions. We joined attendees, including Salesforce’s legion of Trailblazers and partners from all over the globe, in San Francisco to take in product demos and activations and explore innovations designed to make teams more productive at work. And the live magic of Dreamforce was extended beyond the Bay Area, as tens of thousands of people tuned in virtually around the world to watch dozens of the conference’s 1,000+ sessions on Salesforce+.

Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor called it “the great reunion” during their opening keynote. “Salesforce is not a company; Salesforce is a community,” Taylor said.

If you missed Dreamforce 2022 or just didn’t have the time to watch the over 90 Dreamforce sessions featuring Slack, we’ve got you covered. Here are the juiciest Slack takeaways from the Dreamforce keynotes, breakouts and demos.

Accelerate customer success with Salesforce Customer 360

Hearing from our customers was a highlight for us. From IBM to Janssen Pharmaceuticals, we heard story after story of how organizations transformed their way of working to be more pleasant, efficient and productive with Slack. What these customers echoed throughout the conference was that Slack added more value to their Salesforce investment.

Salesforce’s Customer 360 connects your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams around every customer. Rather than having teams at your organization log in to different Salesforce Clouds, we’ve brought Customer 360 into Slack, creating a single engagement layer for all your Salesforce users. That means teams across sales, service and marketing can converge on this shared view of the customer and have unified conversations about different accounts, all in Slack.

In the Slack keynote, “Accelerate the Future of Work,” Slack Americas Executive Vice President Adnan Chaudhry spoke about the value Slack and Sales Cloud together deliver to our customers: 15% faster sales cycles by creating sales channels , 27% higher win rates by adopting automations , and 60% faster customer response times with Slack Connect.

And now with the Salesforce Genie platform in the mix (another buzzworthy announcement at Dreamforce), Slack and Salesforce users can soon deliver “customer magic” from their digital headquarters by harmonizing real-time data from Salesforce clouds into Slack.

Innovate from anywhere and save time with Slack canvas

“When can we start using Slack canvas?” When it came to new products announced at Dreamforce, canvas was a crown jewel—and we learned that users were ready to dive in.

Slated for release next year, canvas is a customizable surface where teams can curate, organize and share resources in their digital HQ, Slack. Anyone will be able to create canvases with time-saving automations on the Slack platform, helping teams maximize their tech stack’s value.

Canvases will supplement collaboration in channels with dedicated, shareable places to keep your most essential resources and information. The same features you use in channels—such as rich previews of clips and profiles of teammates—will become available in canvas. You can organize all your files, messages and multimedia in an existing template and modify as needed. You can also pipe in data from your system of record for your team to reference, and embed workflows to complete tasks in the canvas.

Set new hires up for success with efficient onboarding

When a new teammate joins your organization, typically you’d either create a new onboarding guide or update an existing file. Either way, the process can be time-consuming. Canvases can help simplify and accelerate onboarding.

Let’s say a new service agent has joined your team. With our latest feature, you can create an onboarding canvas that includes resources the agent needs to best serve your organization’s customers. In the canvas, a manager can include channels for the new agent to join, training videos to review and files to read. Managers can also embed workflows to complete tasks, such as requesting a corporate phone. And all of it can be done without ever leaving Slack.

The best part? You can share canvases across the team and reuse your onboarding template for future hires.

Accelerate team selling with Slack canvas and Salesforce

Adopting processes to effectively sell and swarm as a team was addressed in several theater sessions. Canvases can help sales teams maximize effectiveness and win more deals by surfacing key customer insights. Every account channel can have a dedicated canvas that includes essential information everyone on the team can refer to and update.

Features that users will be able to take advantage of include:

• Sharing account plans, executive briefing docs and team contacts
• Creating a curated list of relevant channels team members must be in to support their account
• Implementing common workflows, such as approving requests
• Accessing opportunity, usage and spend data from Salesforce Sales Cloud

“Canvas is another example of how we are bringing Salesforce and Slack together,” said Slack President and CEO Stewart Butterfield. “As Bret Taylor said, ‘Customer 360 and Slack accelerate both platforms disproportionately.’ ”

Increase productivity with new huddles features

No matter where you work, nothing beats having a spontaneous chat with teammates. Sometimes the best work can come from a huddle. Huddles are a digital-first, one-click way to have those quick yet productive conversations. With the average huddle lasting about 10 minutes, they help teams save time, reduce back-and-forths in group DMs and avoid calendar Tetris for scheduled video conferences.

Now our fastest-adopted feature ever just got better at maximizing productivity. At Dreamforce, we announced we’re rolling out new coworking features in huddles. Building on its audio-first experience, huddles now offers teams video, multi-person screen sharing, message threads and more to host live coworking sessions in their digital HQ. Say hello to more powerful and productive coworking.

Automate with ease on our next-generation platform

With businesses around the globe grappling with the financial realities of a tightening economy, we heard some version of the same concern from many attendees: How do we do more with what we have? The answer is automation.

Over the past few years, we’ve been rebuilding the Slack platform from the ground up, giving coders and non-coders alike a faster, more flexible way to build time-saving automations in Slack for your entire organization. At Dreamforce we announced that the new Slack platform is in open beta.

Our new platform provides a set of developer tools and modular, reusable building blocks that allow anyone, regardless of their coding proficiency, to build, customize and share automations that serve their needs. This next-generation platform includes three types of building blocks:

• Functions: Create modular functions that automate work in Slack and connect with your other tools. Other teams can also replicate these functions, so no code goes to waste.
• Workflows: Using your custom or pre-built Slack functions, you can create highly customized workflows for your teams.
• Triggers: In a digital HQ, the when is as important as the what. Add triggers to execute your workflow at precisely the right time.

In the Salesforce on Salesforce session “Driving Productivity with Slack,” Shaun Watson, Salesforce’s VP of Productivity for Collaboration and Slack Business Technology, spoke about how these capabilities let users get creative with how they want to build products. “At the end of the day,” he said, “our goal is to make work easy and give time back to our employees.”

Want more highlights from Dreamforce 2022? Watch recorded sessions on Salesforce+.