Slack is a funny thing. It’s broad enough to provide everyone benefits around communication, collaboration and organization, but it’s customizable enough to become hyper-specialized for the tasks your team does on the daily.
Slack can act as a user-central hub, meaning you don’t need to leave the program to access the information you need. Fewer clicks and less searching equals more time to spend selling.
No two companies use it in exactly the same way, and no two departments or teams do, either. That includes your sales team.
Here are some sales-specific ways you can use Slack’s built-in features, friendly slackbots and integrated sales tools to help your reps spend time more productively and win more deals:
1. Organize your info
Slack recommends sales teams set up channels to cover four main areas:
- Teams (e.g. #sales-team)
- Projects and accounts (e.g. #sales-teathyme)
- Region (e.g. #sales-swontario)
- Function (e.g. #sales-announcements)
Using an intuitive naming convention will help you keep your knowledge in the right places and make information easy to find. Slack’s own handbook for sales teams is incredibly helpful for more tips and tricks around organizing your channels (and more). We recommend you give it a read for inspiration.
2. Integrate with CRMs
If your CRM integrates with Slack, you can set notifications to trigger when certain events happen, like adding contacts or updating an account’s information, so everyone stays up-to-date. It can even search for and pull in data from your CRM so your reps don’t have to switch between windows or interrupt their workflow to grab the information they need.
3. Get answers, fast.
When your communication is written and shared in Slack, it’s documented and searchable. That includes all conversations and questions that are asked in your channels, and the answers to them. But — why not skip the searching in Slack all together and ask your questions directly to Kiite? Kiite’s brings that knowledge to the surface, right when you need it, 24–7.
4. Enable and enhance real-time chat with clients
Slack makes it easy to get answers to clients’ questions on the spot because it’s so quick and easy to pop into chat and ask (especially if you’re using Kiite). Where you’re talking with clients matters, too. With the help of services like Intercom, you can live chat with clients wherever they are — on your website, emails, inside your app or across social media — through Slack.
5. Become your notification hub
We mentioned you can hook up your CRM to give you important alerts through Slack. You can set other notifications as well, with the help of some clever integrations. Did that client open your last email? Did they visit your website? Do they want to schedule a meeting? Try Drift. A promising lead appear in the news? Datafox will let you know. Never miss a beat when it’s all routed through the same place.
6. Make transitions super smooth for clients
When your information is well organized, your clients see big rewards in consistency. Hand-offs between different steps of the sales funnel become simple, and when that deal is closed and they’re moved to an account manager, the client’s full history and context moves with them.
7. Open up cross-team communications
Those smooth transitions usually require that folks from outside your team are present in your Slack channels. Having channels with representation from other departments is great for a few other reasons, too:
- You can easily forward client requests to the appropriate teams.
- Announcements that impact more than one team require only one touchpoint.
- Knowledge and insights that are split across specialties can come together.
- It opens up the floor for discussions around ongoing client support.
8. Celebrate wins
Every small win counts toward high team morale. Many sales teams using Slack recommend setting up a channel specifically for those all-important high-fives, but there are bots like Troops.ai that take it a step further by automating the old-fashioned sales gong to make sure no achievement goes unnoticed (among other things).
Slack doesn’t just make your reps’ lives a little easier and more productive. It can also make you look like a superstar in front of your clients. Think about their experience: their questions are answered immediately, you’re there to meet them when and where it works best, and they get consistent service all the way through.
Our best advice? It’s about finding what fits your team’s processes and culture. If you’re new to Slack, start small and work your way up from there. If you’ve been on Slack for a while, it’s a good idea to reevaluate what’s working and what’s not in your current strategy — and find new tools to test out.
