Slack today unveiled a new native Slack experience, Slack Elevate, which integrates into Sales Cloud data at multiple touchpoints, enabling sales teams to drive better decision-making and making communications more intuitive.
This development is a good move by Slack because salespeople often complain about too many processes, too many apps, and too much of their productivity stolen by organizational overhead. Salesforce has found that salespeople spend less than 30% of their time on sales, according to their State of Sales Report.
Slack Elevate provides sales teams with various capabilities without the need to switch to another application. Slack Elevate offers:
- A new, personalized sales home within Slack, enabling sales teams to focus on the metrics and workflow to help them close deals. Users can access customer data and business insights without leaving Slack; KPIs to track progress toward goals, and a view of opportunities from Sales Cloud. Users can change/update opportunity information, including stage, amount value, and more, from within Slack.
- The ability to stay aligned on deal progress with scheduled and real-time notifications. Managers can go to the sales view to see details personalized by user and role. Managers or sales staff can also set alerts on any opportunity to get notified on general or specific changes.
- The capability to close deals more quickly and drive efficient, effective processes at scale with AI-automated workflows and AI-powered templates through Slack GPT. This is a “bigger picture Slack” – i.e., Slack has various automations via GPT and Canvas with which these AI-powered workflows and/or templates are compatible.
Slack Elevate brings sales automation tools to Slack and should be a time-saver for sales teams that spend a lot of time in Slack. However, it’s not necessarily where the conversation with the customer occurs. Similar approaches are available in the contact center, where agents can update or view Sales information while conversing with customers. The common enemy is app switching; the best approach is determined by which apps the sales team uses most.
“Bringing Sales Cloud into Slack and providing new sales productivity tools and automations in Slack helps sellers save time and access the right people and information to make better decisions,” said Rob Seaman, Slack SVP of Product, who conducted the demonstration of Slack Elevate. “A Slack-based approach to selling will make it easier than ever for Sales Cloud customers to focus on the work that matters: working with customers and closing deals." The announcement is the next evolution of the Sales Productivity Bundle which Ryan Daily covered in December 2022.
It's beneficial for Salesforce to do more with Slack. The Slack Elevate platform is in line with their prior vision with Salesforce Chatter before the acquisition of Slack. It has a CRM-centric perspective. Other products seeking to leverage communications and sales include Balto.ai and RingSense for Sales.
Slack Elevate works with other Slack utilities, such as Slack Canvas. It also enables the user to bring and share a personalized view in a meeting or Slack Huddle. For example, to present a personal pipeline. Slack Elevate is accessible on mobile devices for those with Slack Mobile. It is nice to see that Salesforce continues to enhance Slack.
Slack expects this new experience will continue to evolve, possibly to include integrations with other CRMs. Currently, it is limited to Sales Cloud.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and analyst at TalkingPointz.
