Scott BrittonSince April 1st, 2014, Slack has roughly added 4,000 new users per day. Whoa.
The disruptive communication medium delivers value that’s intuitive to utilize from day one. Eventually, though, we started to wonder what this tool could do for our sales team besides serve as a basic communication channel. Are there specific sales issues we can solve creatively with Slack? How are other sales teams using it?
Whether you’re one of the 4,000 new users who just downloaded Slack for the first time yesterday, or if you’ve been Slackin’ for 2+ years, there are a host of issues it can solve which you may not have thought about.
10 Slack Hacks for Your Sales Team
1) Team Alerts
What does your sales team do to celebrate wins? You can actually alert your entire team the minute a close happens within Slack. You can create a Slack channel to share wins manually or use automation to do this with the Troops’ deal gong (gifs included!).
2) Custom Word Notifications
Do you sometimes feel like Slack gets noisy with all the notifications? Thankfully, there’s a feature that enables admins to automatically highlight certain word notifications, allowing important conversations regarding key customers to escalate faster.
3) Scheduled Reminders
In the old days (2 weeks ago) we set reminders for ourselves on our calendars or even on a sticky note…this can be cumbersome, especially on mobile. With Slack, by typing “/remind” when chatting with Slackbot it will not only send you reminders, but also send reminders to your teammates at times you specify.
4) Lead Notifications
Having trouble responding to your leads in real-time? Want to know everything about the lead as soon as it comes in? With the Clearbit integration on Slack, you can set up lead intelligence so that when new leads come to your website, you are notified with all the information they provide.
5) Specialized Channels
Without some upfront planning, your Slack instance can pretty quickly become a mess. This is why it’s important to establish consistent naming standards. One place this becomes increasingly important is when you start to establish channels about specific customers. These types of channels can be highly effective when there are people from multiple teams working on an account i.e sales, customer success, and sales engineering.
A simple example could be:
opportunities_[name]
accounts_name
Understanding when it makes the most sense to customer specific channels happens over time so don’t stress if it’s not perfect in the beginning…there is immense value in having all of this conversation in one place for future reference!
6) Team Standups
Do you feel like you’re spending an unnecessarily long time on daily standups and status meetings? You can give your sales team back some time by doing these standups in Slack. For example, everyone can share a status of what they’re doing before 9 a.m. in order to sync. This is a great hack for remote teams, where people can waste a lot of time zoning out when they could be getting more done.
7) Mention Alerts
Deliver more value when you do outbound marketing by gathering as much knowledge as you can on your prospects with Datafox. Set up mentions of your prospects in the news so that you’re constantly informed and knowledgeable about potential customers.
8) Specific channels for parts of the sales process.
For example, when you close a deal, head into the Slack channel that your AMs and CSMs are in to give them information on deal history, key players and more. Some other channels you could set up include:
#LeadGen
#FeatureRequests
#CustomerObjections
9) Time Zone Alerts
Have some members of your team that are in different time zones than you? Slack will make sure that you don’t wake anyone up at 3 a.m. by alerting you when someone else is in a different time zone and might not be by a computer. Yes, you can still send the message if you want to, but know that you won’t get a response for another couple of hours.
10) Force questions on your sales team through Slack
Instead of losing time in the day to find someone and ask them a question, throw it in a designated Slack channel (ex. #training) so they can answer it immediately. You can even create a rule that if a question has already been answered in Slack, it won’t be answered in-person to encourage slack adoption and usage amongst the sales team.
Try these 10 slack hacks and see if your sales team’s productivity improves. If you can’t get enough of Slack either, the tips and hacks don’t end here – check out what else you can do.
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