In my job at tray, I spend a lot of time working out of Slack, and it’s fascinating to see how teams using it have evolved well beyond basic messaging to integrating their favorite apps.

The vast majority of teams I speak to actually prefer to receive notifications via Slack (real-time) than via email (delayed).

As a Sales Leader, consider the following:

• How much do you know about the deals that are going on in your team?
• Are you aware of everything that’s going on, beyond the data you can see in Salesforce Reports?
• Are there potential roadblocks that you could assist in handling?
• What impact would gaining these insights have on improving revenue?

Real-time notifications

To provide a basic example, let’s look at opportunities (deals) in a CRM - such as Salesforce.

If you’re running a sales team, providing some high-level context on all opportunities in Slack can really help facilitate good team communication:

Sales cycles are rarely plain sailing - there’s often technical or design details to clarify, legals to go through, and FYI’s to send. Real-time Slack notifications like the above help keep everyone in the loop and fundamentally, drive more sales.

Designing for scale

The above example is great for a 5 person sales team, but what if you’re a 150+ person sales organization, operating across multiple territories and time zones, with a large number teams and platforms involved? Imagine how much noise you'd get from the above if all opportunity notifications were sent to one channel!

Working with teams of this size requires a different approach.

Let’s say you're a media company, and have design teams working in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East - whose role is to support the sales team. Not every sales opportunity requires design input, but many do.

Ideally you’ll want to have a process that selectively notifies the relevant team when a relevant opportunity is created:

The above logic could then translate to a targeted message:

In fact, if you’re working across multiple teams and platforms, chances are it'll look more like this:

Key takeaways

Slack is a fantastic communication tool, but as with any tool, it’s possible to get information overload. Building a process for a 5 person team is very different for a 150+ person team - so consider what your ideal approach would be when starting out.

To implement more real-time notifications, you can get started with the Slack app store, or if you need a bit more flexibility, you might consider a tool like tray.io or a third party developer to interact with the Slack API.

Want to get started connecting Slack with Salesforce? Visit our Slack page to learn more, or feel free to drop us a message at support@tray.io.