Salesforce Announces First Slack Integration Following $28 Billion Acquisition

When Salesforce acquired Slack for nearly $ 28 billion late last year, it seemed like they had big plans for the company, and today the CRM tycoon announced some initial integrations that will benefit Salesforce customers. 

Slack’s VP at Salesforce, Rob Seaman, sees Slack as a promising communications platform for Salesforce. According to him, “We really want Slack to be the primary engagement surface for our users, their communications, their work, their workflows and the processes and the apps they support.”  

We’re announcing this new opportunity to support Slack’s vision for sales, service, marketing, and analytics. “And for each of those areas what we’re doing is a combination of articulating, both in best practices and codifying, how you can and should model your sales, service and marketing organisations in this new world,” he added.  

The Company hopes that by leveraging Slack’s ability to integrate external enterprise apps inside the application, they’ll find a faster, easier way to speed up and automate various Salesforce tasks. 

To start with, Sales Cloud provides a dedicated space (called Deal Room) for transactions where all parties involved in complex sales, whether internal departments such as finance and product personnel, or external partners, can unite throughout the Slack sales cycle to track events or sale processes. 

The integration also allows sales teams involved in more complex deals to receive daily updates with daily tasks, appointments, and a priority list of deals that are automatically collected from Slack. 

Service teams can meet at Salesforce Swarm, a place where teams can help each other with a specific question or problem. This can be helpful for companies with large product catalogs, and desire quick responses.  Swarms can be helpful when there are more specific questions involved and someone with that knowledge could be just what’s needed. Service team members can also invite experts to join the team to answer questions or help resolve issues faster. 

What’s not to be overlooked is the fact that marketing is gets smarter with Datorama, a company that Salesforce acquired in 2018. Plus, marketers get regular Slack updates as their marketing campaigns change. 

Lastly, there is the integration with Tableau, which was acquired by Salesforce for $6.5 billion in 2018. Salesforce is a mergers and acquisitions company. Similar to how marketers receive campaign updates, other users can receive Slack updates when the data they consider important gets updated in Tableau. They can also get daily reports on the key metrics that matter to them directly from Slack. 

This seems to be a great start for Salesforce. In no time, we will get to know more about Slack integration at the Dreamforce customer conference next month and in the months ahead. Seaman promised more expansion between Salesforce and Slack in the four areas: Sales, Service, Marketing and Analytics, as well as across all cloud and industry solutions in the Salesforce’s product category which is under development.