Dive Brief:
- Slack Sales Elevate, a personalized product aimed at sales roles, became generally available Wednesday. The company said the new feature will link Salesforce's Sales Cloud more closely to the collaboration platform.
- "It's an entirely new native experience in Slack that deeply integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud," said Rob Seaman, SVP, enterprise product at Slack. "It's going to help people focus on what matters most with a new view for them right in Slack."
- The new product, available as a paid add-on, will let sales professionals track progress toward goals, close deals and have access to Salesforce information in real time.
Dive Insight:
The crux behind Salesforce's $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack in 2020 was to closely connect two key enterprise functions: sales and collaboration.
Under Salesforce’s wing, Slack grew annual revenues from $1.1 billion at the time of the acquisition to $1.5 billion annually, according to Salesforce data shared at its investor day in October.
The latest effort from Slack puts critical data closer to the tools employees already use to connect with one another. Although integrations already existed through in-platform applications and other features, Sales Elevate delivers a more tailored experience to employees in sales roles.
"It's a dedicated view within Slack," Seaman said. "Your Salesforce role, responsibility and data visibility is automatically inherited."
In keeping with a broader theme in the vendor ecosystem, Slack sees opportunity for generative AI tools to augment the capabilities of its product.
In May, Slack announced the forthcoming availability of Slack GPT, which it described as a conversational AI experience letting users automate and customize work processes. Slack GPT hasn't yet been made publicly available, but the company expects generative AI features will expand how users adopt Sales Elevate.
Creating customer briefing documents and other tasks that take up time for salespeople is a good fit with Slack GPT's forthcoming availability, Seaman said.
Brian Millham, president and COO at Salesforce, praised the potential of generative AI tools during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call in May, for the period ending April 30.
"We're seeing tremendous appetite for our new generative AI products, starting with Einstein GPT, Slack GPT, and Data Cloud," said Millham. "Our generative AI products will be catalysts for our future growth."
