How to use Slack for TO-DO list

Tami Reiss is the founder of The Product Leader Coach where she works with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

I manage a small inbound sales team at Justworks. In a recent 1<>1 one of my direct reports asked about how he could make sure he wasn’t letting some prospects fall through the cracks.

To paint you a picture, I must start by explaining that our team does not have a typical sales funnel where an individual prospect is assigned to a sales rep. We have collaborative queues where any team member can help a prospect. The process isn’t perfect, but it means that we have a response time often within minutes or hours and new customers have confidence that whoever they talk to at Justworks will be helpful and knowledgable.

Here’s the list of places our team has to check to see who to reach out or respond to:

1. Zendesk is where all prospect email communications come in
2. Slack Channel with Customer Support who handles front line questions but escalates to our team when needed.
3. Jira dashboard with requests for more information on benefits quotes requests.
4. Salesforce dashboard with and follow-up questions to workers’ comp insurance applications.
5. Slack Channel with Marketing Response team who passes inbound leads to us based on specific criteria.
6. Redash dashboard with lists of prospects in different stages and contact information for nudging.
7. Slack messages with other sales, support, or operations teams who help us.

Our team sends / answers 300+ emails and calls daily from prospects.

So when my direct report was asking for help, it was a legitimate request. The first time he mentioned it, I suggested generic methods like using a physical or virtual To-Do list when things came up and adding future follow-up tasks to his calendar as a reminder.

A few weeks later, I asked if that had helped and didn’t get the most positive response. Those workflows had made some things better but the frustration centered around SLACK. Though it is an excellent tool for getting real time responses, with so many channels to monitor and continuously refreshing conversation chains, it was difficult to remember what needed to be done.

Being a product manager, I watched my user in action before making additional suggestions. The struggle was that when a new message or notification came through, the channel would be bolded and on screen alerts would appear. But once opened, there was no visual cue as to where old messages containing important info about prospects and actions to take were.

We thought about looking at threads, but most of the conversations were not in threads. Then I remembered ***the star***. I don’t know exactly why “star message” was added as a feature in Slack, but it always seemed to me like their way to save something for the future. I used it at previous companies to save links that were shared or important information. But at our company, Slack messages are purged pretty frequently so it wasn’t as useful.

But stars were perfect for the current problem! They allowed the inbound sales rep to flag messages for follow-up later in the day. So the new flow became…

1. If an issue can be resolved right now — do it.
2. If an issue needs to be resolved later — star it.
3. “Show Starred Items” at a set time during each day and triage the items.

The new process has been very helpful and less things are falling through the cracks.

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.