Slack plus Sales Cloud: your sales team’s new productivity platform

Buyers are more impatient and unpredictable than ever. For starters, customers don’t want to communicate over phone and email anymore. According to Gartner, 80% of B2B sales interactions are expected to occur in digital channels by 2025. Customers also expect support and meaningful engagement from their vendors. A recent Salesforce survey found that 87% of business buyers are looking to their sales rep to be a trusted advisor in the sales process.

This means reps need to spend more time building relationships and meeting customers on their terms, and sales managers and sales ops need to keep their teams accountable for data entry, so they can stay on top of deals in the pipeline and continuously optimize their teams for performance.

Salesforce and Slack just made things easier with Sales Cloud for Slack, an app that brings the rich context of Salesforce directly into Slack. Think of Slack as a way to make quick updates to Sales Cloud records or pull in relevant context, all while staying in the flow of work. It transforms how sales teams communicate, collaborate, and act on customer information from Salesforce.

With Slack as your digital headquarters—a central place where remote and hybrid teams can collaborate online—reps, managers and operations experts can quickly tap into business processes, cross-functional partners and valuable data from one of the leading CRMs in the industry: Salesforce.

Make pipeline management more efficient than ever

Sales Cloud for Slack makes it easier for reps to edit and update opportunities, accounts, contacts and leads in Sales Cloud in your digital HQ: Slack. This integration saves reps valuable time they can use to drum up leads and close deals.

When the Flow tool is turned on (see below), sales managers can set up automatic notifications about big shifts in accounts. Meanwhile, sales ops can see all updates to the CRM directly in Salesforce. Our CRM template brings structure to your sales process without the complexity of a full-blown CRM platform. It’s a simple, pre-built framework for organizing and managing your customer relationships right where you already work.

Collaborate using context-rich data

Never feel unprepared for a meeting again. Now reps can find and edit Salesforce records on the fly, as soon as new information comes in through a channel or DM, or even while on a call. Not only does this encourage better data organization, it gives reps the space to focus on relationship building, rather than fumbling around looking for information.

Context sharing is just as important internally. With Sales Cloud for Slack, you share records by quickly pulling up information and contextualizing it with a message, without leaving Slack. Let’s say you made a new contact at a hot target account that hasn’t been discussed in a while—just search for what you need from Slack and share it.

Move work out of email and into channels

The real magic behind the union of Salesforce and Slack happens when you start moving conversations out of endless email chains and into Slack channels. With our app, you can launch dedicated account channels straight from Salesforce or Slack, so key stakeholders on dedicated accounts can stay aligned. As customer relationships and deals progress, the app automatically notifies the team of updates made to records, whether from Sales Cloud or Slack, keeping everyone up to speed.

Automate awareness with Salesforce Flow

Sales ops, this one’s for you. Flow provides Salesforce automation to any Slack conversation and is a powerful tool to keep in mind as your team scales and increasingly wants alerts for specific types of information from Salesforce. There are endless ways to automate workflows between Slack and Salesforce so you can notify relevant channels of big deals or wins and surface opportunities.

You can also design flows that trigger Slack actions based on Salesforce behaviors. For example, you can set up a flow to create a Slack channel for deals that are above a certain dollar amount. Equally important for Slack hygiene, you can set up a flow to archive channels once a deal has closed.

Win more deals and maximize your team’s effectiveness

With a digital HQ for Sales, reps have valuable data, business processes and cross-functional partners right at their fingertips, in one single layer of engagement—because when work flows, revenue grows. Download the Sales Cloud for Slack app from the Slack App Directory.