Getting Sales Analytics into the Flow of Work with Slack
Supercharge your sales cycle through the power of Slack, Salesforce, and CRM Analytics by putting data at the center of every conversation.
Your company has made significant investments into Salesforce over the years. You’ve recently undergone a significant digital transformation, completing a big Sales Cloud modernization, and rolled out Slack to connect your teams, tools, processes, customers, and partners.
Sales Cloud sits on a wealth of powerful data, data which you need to expose to your team to analyze and take action on. You’re using standard reporting & dashboards to track key KPIs and have explored CRM Analytics for more advanced reporting. However, adoption is low and your users aren’t collaborating on the wealth of information they have available…but everyone is in Slack.
Getting analytics into the flow of work is challenging, and the rise of remote and hybrid work hasn’t made that any easier. Context switching between tools to interact with analytics is a drag on productivity. Email is decentralized and too slow for conversation. With all the tools you have at your disposal, wouldn’t it be great if we could put data at the center of every conversation and increase productivity? This is where Slack — the place where work happens, and the CRM Analytics for Slack app comes to the rescue. This blog will review the top use cases for the CRM Analytics for Slack app and show how to set them up.
This blog assumes you have already set up the CRM Analytics app in Slack. For information on how to set that up, check this article.
Subscriptions
One of the first things you do every week is check your Pipeline Change dashboard. You want insight into everything that has changed since last week. It may be the case that you’re too busy, on vacation, or simply forget to check the dashboard in Salesforce. In time crunches like this, you still want to share the dashboard with the rest of your team so you can collaborate on open opportunities and drive them to closure. With the CRM Analytics app, you can set a subscription to send the dashboard at a predetermined frequency to a channel (or even Direct Message “DM”) in Slack. The dashboards can now be pushed to Slack in an automated method — giving you more time to focus on the work that matters.
The importance of an intentional approach to rolling out Slack channels and integrations across your organization cannot be understated. When done right, they will increase transparency, improve employee engagement, and reduce silos of information.
You will then receive the dashboard as an automated message to the channel or DM you selected per the schedule.
You can click on the dashboard to zoom in and explore different parts of the dashboard. In this example, you’ve zoomed in to the detail table and notice a large deal on an account you’ve worked on in the past that is at the last stage before closure. In the message thread, you tag the Opportunity Owner that you’ve got some intel on the account that can help push it to closure. Within seconds, you’re both in aa Slack huddle strategizing on next steps. This action on the insight you gained on the dashboard could lead to a shorter sales cycle and higher win likelihood!
To set this up, find the dashboard in the CRM Analytics for Slack app. You can use a search command, like /analytics-search dashboard name. Hit the ellipses icon and then Subscribe.
The last step is to set the frequency and the channel or DM you want it sent to. If you set up a Saved View in CRM Analytics, you can even select a snapshot option. This is useful if you want to set the dashboard in the automated Slack message to a certain filter, such as geography-based to North America.
Notifications
As a sales leader, one of the metrics you track closest is Quota Attainment. You check every week to see if you are on target to hit your quota. In CRM Analytics, you track quota against won business and want to be notified when Quota Attainment crosses a certain threshold.
You’re in Slack more than Salesforce, so want a notification sent to you and your team’s channel when Quota Attainment crosses 90%.
Then, we can use the power of Slack to collaborate with your team and ultimately lead to a better business outcome. Here, you congratulate your team and tag reps to motivate them to close a big deal they’re working on.
To set this up, hover over the Quota widget and click the Set Notification icon.
Then, complete the prompts on the right-hand side. You’ll need to set the threshold criteria, and frequency you want to check the criteria. This frequency is when the threshold notification will be sent.
Lastly, in Slack, find the Notifications section in the CRM Analytics for Slack. Click the ellipses icon next to the Notification you want to set and then Edit.
Select who you want to send it to (channel or DM), and you’re all set!
Find, share, and collaborate
A key to digesting analytics successfully is the ability to find insights fast, share them with colleagues and external parties, and collaborate on them to take an action that will lead to a better business outcome. You want to be able to share analytics not only with your colleagues, but also external parties that you partner with through Slack Connect channels. Your team has created a Market Analysis dashboard that tracks sentiment on the product you sell, among other things. You notice that a certain product has received poor sentiment and share it to a product-focused escalation Slack Connect channel (e.g. #ext-acme-product-escalations):
You tag your internal sales rep and external distribution partner in the thread about the poor sentiment and ask to start a Slack huddle. A major benefit is that you are broadening the audience who can digest the analytics and gain insights; the distribution partner doesn’t have access to Salesforce, so they never would have been able to see this dashboard online without the CRM Analytics for Slack app. On the huddle, the team decides to pull all the bulk peanut butter off of the shelves. You’re disappointed about the hit you’ll take, but customer satisfaction is your top priority, and you know it’s the right decision in the long run.
Why CRM Analytics for Slack?
As these examples show, the capabilities to subscribe to dashboards, set threshold-based notifications, and find, share, and collaborate on analytics in Slack can lead to better business outcomes. Let’s summarize the biggest benefits that the CRM Analytics for Slack app gives.
Faster insight to action
Research has shown that the average Slack user has Slack open 9 hours per day and has 1.5 of active use per day. These numbers are higher than Salesforce usage. By setting up Subscriptions and Notifications to Slack, users are likely to see the analytics quicker, giving them faster insights that they can take action on.
Wider audience-reach for analytics
To view dashboards in Slack, you don’t need a Salesforce or CRM Analytics app. This enables you to share analytics assets with non-Sales colleagues and external parties that don’t have Salesforce licenses.
Better productivity
When users can interact with analytics within Slack, there is less switching between apps, saving reps time, and giving them more time to do more selling.
Getting sales analytics into the flow of work with Slack will lead to faster insight to action, a wider audience-reach for analytics, and better productivity for your reps. Ultimately, this will lead to better decision making, shorter sales cycles, and more sales.
Engage our team of experts to help accelerate the digital transformation of your Sales organization through the power of Slack, Salesforce, and CRM Analytics by putting data at the center of every conversation.
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