Salesforce debuts Sales Elevate, bringing its cloud into Slack

Salesforce is deeply integrating Sales Cloud with Slack. The Marc Benioff-led CRM giant today said it is launching Slack Sales Elevate, a new experience in the work collaboration platform that will enable sales executives and managers to keep tabs on active opportunities and close deals more seamlessly.

The offering, which goes into general availability from today, will come at an additional cost of $60 per user per month – over Slack’s regular paid plans – and save executives from going back to Sales Cloud for basic day-to-day tasks such as updating their pipelines and adding deal values.

“Bringing Sales Cloud into Slack and providing new sales productivity tools and automation in Slack helps sellers save time and access the right people and information to make better decisions,” Rob Seaman, SVP of product at Slack, said in a statement. “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.”

How will Slack Sales Elevate help?

Companies across sectors want sales reps to double down on their selling activities and drive revenues. However, the reality is far from this expectation, as most executives remain bogged down in administrative work and cumbersome tools, leading to less efficient selling. According to Salesforce’s State of Sales report, reps currently spend over 70% of their time on non-selling tasks.

“Throughout the course of a week, sales reps are constantly communicating with their colleagues and customers. They’re figuring out things like how much a deal is worth or when it could be closed, and taking notes of all this along with what the next steps are. Then, when the manager asks for a forecast, they go get all these notes and update them in batch in Salesforce,” Seaman told VentureBeat. This takes a lot of time.

To address this gap and save sellers from drowning in admin work, Salesforce is adding Slack Sales Elevate. The experience brings a personalized selling home on Slack, centralizing information from Sales Cloud and giving executives data and admin tools right where they are having their conversations about selling.

As the company explains, the offering brings a new Sales tab to Slack, where reps can go to get a bird’s-eye view of their open opportunities, opportunities closing soon, and the revenue generated. It pulls in data from the Sales Cloud and even allows the executives to take action on their pipeline without moving out of Slack. 

For instance, executives could bump up the amount for an account, change the stage it is in, or add the next steps planned to close the deal. As the changes are made, they are updated directly back in Salesforce.

More importantly, the new experience also ties in with notifications and reminders. For example, executives can be notified about updating their opportunity pipeline before a forecast call. Meanwhile, sales managers, who get a view of all team opportunities with more comprehensive pipeline tools, can set up automatic notifications for all kinds of deal updates, be it stage change for a specific opportunity, amount updates or new opportunities. 

This way, when an executive closes a deal and updates that information on their opportunity pipeline within the Sales tab, the manager can be notified right away – with all the changes syncing back to Salesforce at the same time. No more need to run a report or go on a one-on-one.

Notably, Slack Sales Elevate also allows users to leverage AI-powered, no-code workflows with Salesforce-triggered notifications, like support requests and deal approvals, without any technical expertise. So, when a new opportunity from Sales Cloud updates in Slack, a workflow could use that data to generate and send a note in an account channel to alert the sales rep to follow up. However, this is not yet available in Slack Sales Elevate.

Expanding the use of Salesforce

While Slack Sales Elevate will save sales reps’ time, Seaman emphasized it is not aimed at stopping users from accessing Salesforce. In fact, the offering is just an extension of Sales Cloud, giving a real-time view and extending its usage.

“We have a concept that we call thick work and thin work,” he explained. “Thin work is something like updating your opportunities or being told something happened, while thick work is more comprehensive stuff, like realigning sales territories or configuring a complex product with a lot of options. That’s a natural point where you would bounce from Slack to Salesforce. We think it’ll result in more usage of Salesforce as a result.”

The Slack SVP noted that the offering is being tested by “tens of thousands” of enterprises, including Box and Roku. Sales reps have seen a 76% time reduction in managing their pipelines, he added.

Moving ahead, the company also plans to improve the experience of Slack Sales Elevate and focus on improving access to other Salesforce segments, including marketing and service. However, Seaman noted that there’s no timeline for it yet.

“We’re charting a path for these kinds of domain-specific experiences within Slack. But what we’ll probably do first is enhance the experience of Sales — like you want to know when one of your customers logs a case, or you want to know when the customer has been included in a marketing campaign. We’ll probably start ingesting that information for notification purposes with Sales and then nail this experience before we start moving into service or marketing,” he said.

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