Sales team communication just got a lot easier
Slack is clearly the darling of the business messaging apps category these days. As MetaLab founder Andrew Wilkinson nicely summed up, Slack has essentially stollen a multi-billion dollar market. Is Slack doing anything that other messaging apps don’t already do? Not necessarily. However, the one notable exception is how easy Slack makes it to connect other applications into their product. Today there are 1,000s of apps that, with just a couple of mouse clicks, are easily integrated into the Slack app. In example, marketeers that use Slack can now get their marketing campaign performance conveniently delivered into a Slack channel or a developer can get updates on code commits from Github. In both cases, the respective marketing and development teams can see and share this information as well. But why hasn’t anyone provided sales teams with a reason to use Slack?
Sales engagement in a Slack-filled world
At Illumineto, like so many companies, we rely on Slack for centralized communication and information sharing — not only between all of us in the company — but also from each of the various services we use to keep our own app up and running. 100% of our micro services (things like our Stripe credit card processing to our Intercom-based customer success application to all of our marketing automation too) each report in to different Slack channels. This makes information sharing very easy for each of us. If someone needs to understand more about a customer service issue, a marketing program and much, much more… it’s just a click of a link in a Slack delivered message for the answer.
One thing we did early on was integrate our own application, Illumineto Spark, into Slack. We use our own product extensively for our sales engagement purposes too. Very quickly it became clear to us how helpful it would be for each of the activities that our prospects engaged in — things like opening our emails, what items that we shared with them are reviewed (and for how long), questions they sent to use via our apps’ own built-in chat service — would help us with our own sales tactics.
It wasn’t too long before we realized our own customers would love this capability too. So, we released our integration earlier this month. All Illumineto Spark customers have free use of this Slack integration and it’s super easy to setup (here’s a support article on that very topic).
Illumineto Spark delivers sales engagement activities directly into Slack, helping us to prioritize our prospecting time as well as see in real-time what’s most important to our prospects, allowing us to adapt our sales approach and close the deal faster.
We’re expecting to see sales reps connect Spark directly into Slack for their own insight — just like the screenshot above. But what we really expect to be a game changer is for sales teams working together on an opportunity to connect Illumineto Spark into a team Slack channel and have all prospect engagement (email opens, chat messages, document reviews, shares and more) delivered into that channel for the entire team to see and act upon. Gone are the days of important prospect actions getting lost in an email inbox or worse, never reported. Now sales reps and sales teams will gain great insight into all their sales engagement activities.
