Transforming how sales teams work and win

Slack Sales Elevate is supercharging sales productivity and giving sellers back valuable time.

Whether it’s shuffling through tabs, switching between devices, or manually having to update multiple apps, sales reps are losing valuable time to administrative—and often duplicative—tasks. A mere 28% of a rep’s week is dedicated to actual selling, and customer expectations are only getting higher—which leaves teams spread thin and distracted from doing the work that truly matters to close deals.

To supercharge operations and bolster productivity so that teams can meet the moment, Slack developed a new solution called Slack Sales Elevate. Directly integrated with Salesforce, Slack Sales Elevate brings Sales Cloud into Slack, making it easier for sellers to update and access real-time CRM data and collaborate across teams. Through custom notifications and workflows that automate sales processes, Slack Sales Elevate offers leaders increased visibility, and gives reps back critical time by enabling them to move faster through essential work.

We sat down with Adnan Chaudhry, executive vice president of Slack Sales, to learn more about how technology is transforming sales team operations and how Slack Sales Elevate is enabling greater efficiency, shorter sales cycles, and increased win rates.

When it comes to productivity, what are some of the hurdles facing sales teams today?

There is a new proliferation of technology and tools that sales teams use to do their day-to-day jobs. The tools that were initially intended to make reps more productive are actually doing the exact opposite. They’re killing productivity. On average, a typical sales team uses 10 different tools to close one deal, based on our research. This constant context switching among tools has a big impact. With Slack Sales Elevate, our goal is to give reps back one day a week that would be spent on non-selling tasks. 

What is Slack Sales Elevate? How does it work with Slack and Sales Cloud?

Slack Sales Elevate is an entirely new way for teams to sell together in Slack and win. It’s built on our next generation platform, so it brings together real-time customer relationship management (CRM) data from Sales Cloud to Slack—the place where the conversation is happening. We’re simplifying and automating that work to drive productivity. 

It also improves team visibility: All team members can view and update Salesforce opportunities in Slack, which boosts collaboration and improves decision-making. It eliminates time-consuming tasks. It also drives greater process efficiency through AI-ready workflows and sales templates that are based on Salesforce best practices. It centralizes team-selling and improves productivity by making CRM data and other tools accessible from any device. That way, reps can effortlessly update their Salesforce records right from inside Slack. It’s really this user-friendly application with enterprise-grade back-end security that ties into Salesforce.

How is Slack Sales Elevate different from other solutions in the market?

It’s built natively on Slack and has multiple deep integration points with Sales Cloud. We talked to the people at Salesforce who are the best at CRM, and the people at Slack who are the best at automation and productivity, and brought those two teams together to unlock the power of customer data and insights for every line of business in Slack. We are just getting started and already see results from Slack Sales Elevate users. Reps are updating their deals two times faster than before. They’re reporting 53% less time spent per week on CRM administration. Sixty-three percent of our users say selling is much easier. And when we talk to the sales managers, 87% say staying up-to-date on their deals is easier. 

Why is CRM data so important, and what are some of the common challenges sales teams encounter around managing and extracting value from it?

If you want to understand a full customer profile, you need to build trust with that customer and make sure you have the right data. One of the things we’re seeing with Slack Sales Elevate is increased frequency in updates, so the fidelity and richness of CRM data has already improved. Our reps are updating all the stages of any given deal in real time. Previously, that was relatively static; reps would engage with CRM data maybe once a week at best. Now, they get off a meeting or a call and make updates on their mobile devices.

Slack already plays a vital role in so many organizations. As more companies embrace remote work and hybrid models, how has the platform evolved to make teams more productive?

There’s a revolution happening right underneath our feet: the AI revolution. I’m really excited about it. Companies have an amazing opportunity to finally break through the challenges and bottlenecks they’ve been facing for decades. Companies that don’t embrace AI and automation are going to quickly fall behind. How do you leverage this new kind of productivity in a way that reduces the workload for employees and gives them back time? That’s where Slack comes in to bring people and technology together in a new way. Wherever they are, wherever they’re working, they have this accelerated AI and automation at their fingertips—whether they’re C-level or in sales. 

More organizations are embracing automation. What impact has that had on sales teams in particular? What are some of the features you and your colleagues get the most value from? 

Let me take you to a world before Slack Sales Elevate. In a typical organization like ours, there’s a weekly pipeline call where reps update all their key deals—dollar amounts and stages. Our company forecast call isn’t until the following Monday. That’s a full week. Six days have passed by the time I’m using that information to make business decisions and forecast outcomes. That’s the way it used to be. Now, when I’m on these calls, our reps can be leaving a meeting or having a customer interaction, and they’re updating their information right in Slack Sales Elevate immediately. If we’re on a forecast call and notice that something is off, it’ll get updated right away. Teams used to leave a meeting with a long list of things to update and do, but now it’s being done instantaneously.

Another example is alerts and notifications. In a typical CRM, news about whether a deal slipped, was lost, changed to a different stage, or moved out of the quarter—that information is something you’d have to find and surface once a week. With Slack Sales Elevate, I have this information at my fingertips on my mobile device. It enables me to be engaged in my business on a whole different level. 

Team selling is critical in today’s environment. How does Slack Sales Elevate supercharge internal and external sales discussions?

With Slack, teams have a centralized workplace where we can collaborate and stay aligned, which is paramount for improved visibility and moving deals forward. There’s a unified place where people are interacting with the same type of data. That’s where the value is: in the interaction with the data. We also have this solution called canvas, which is accessible in Slack Sales Elevate. Canvas is a surface within Slack where teams can collect, organize, and share information. And then, finally, we have Slack Connect. There was a world where the gold standard of a relationship with a customer was having them on SMS and texting with them. With Slack Connect, sales teams are connected directly to the customer. Whether it’s reviewing legal documents or pricing documents, sellers can work securely within Slack as opposed to communicating out of different inboxes and messages. This means both parties can check, exchange feedback, and update one another on progress and blockers. Product experts can be added to the channel to review the history and add input. 

Looking forward, how can Slack Sales Elevate set teams up for continued success?

Slack is on a mission to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. The great thing is, Slack Sales Elevate is built on existing processes that our customers already have and love with Sales Cloud, so it truly is a productivity multiplier. Typically, in an enterprise, you’d find a solution that would take somewhere between three to nine months to implement before turning it on. With Slack Sales Elevate, you can literally just turn it on and start using it in one afternoon.