If you’re in sales, chances are you’ve heard of Slack. It’s a popular messaging platform that helps teams communicate and collaborate more effectively. And it turns out that Slack can be a valuable tool for sales organizations as well. How are sales teams using Slack for sales?

According to a recent study, 70% of sales departments have dedicated channels for their most important prospects. That means they’re using Slack to keep track of critical conversations, share information quickly, and stay organized throughout the sales process.

As someone who uses Slack every day to stay connected with my team, I was curious to learn more about how other salespeople were using the platform. So I did some research and talked to a few experts on the subject. Here’s what I learned about how to use Slack for sales.

Slack for Sales: Customer Relationship Management Tool

Slack is a customer relationship management tool that enables sales teams to manage their customer relationships and sales pipeline in one place.

It gives sales teams the ability to see all of their customer interactions in one place, including customer contact information, communication history, and sales opportunities.

Slack also provides sales teams with the ability to create and manage tasks and to-dos, set reminders, and track their sales pipeline.

Slack Tip 1: Use Multi-Threads for Accounts

For large clients, you usually aren’t the only one involved in the sales process. You typically involve other stakeholders, such as C-level executives, and check LinkedIn profiles for more contacts.

Doing that over email is a nightmare. Constant forwards and long, confusing, and disorganized threads that are hard to follow.

In Slack, you can organize all your team’s conversations around a single account.

To keep your conversations organized, start new threads for each question. That way, your main discussion stays on-topic, and your additional comments don’t get lost in the fray.

Just select the message you want to send and reply to start a text conversation.

You can follow a conversation even if you’ve not commented on it.

If you want to respond to an individual in a chat but don’t want to interrupt the entire conversation, you can add them to a thread. That way, you can answer their question or ask a follow-up without them being distracted by other messages.

Slack Tip 2: Minimize Context Switching

Interruptions are bad for productivity and context switches are interruptions.

When building your sales pipeline, it’s important to minimize the time you switch between different applications. Getting your CRM into Slack makes it easier to do your work. (Source)

Fewer interruptions mean more time actually spent closing sales.

Slack Tip 3: Share Thought Leadership Articles

The sales team at Slack loves the Thought Leadership Channel.

Instead of clogging up your inbox with emails about interesting reads, you can instead share them on a dedicated Slack chat.

When posting articles on topics like the future of work or the latest tech trends, it is more effective to link to them in a designated idea-sharing forum. This keeps your inbox from getting clogged with unnecessary emails and allows your team to access the info when they want to.

Slack Tip 4: Let Salespeople Help Each Other

Need help with an account? Ask your questions in the #sales-help Slack channel.

By asking everyone for their input, you allow your sales team to work together and help each other out. This fosters a collaborative environment and allows them to better work together.

If you have a skill-specific LinkedIn group, anyone can post questions to the group. This makes it easy for anyone in the group to refer back to previous answers.

If you stumble upon a gem of a tip in one of your accounts, share it with the community. By sharing it, you’ll create a repository of useful tips and tricks that the entire sales team can refer back to.

Slack Tip 5: Share Successful Sales Decks

Set up a Slack channel where team members can share sales-customized marketing collateral. This way, everyone in the sales department can benefit from successful decks and learn from them.

He recommends labeling your channels with “Sales Presentations” or something similar.

Slack Tip 6: Make Marketing Assets Easy to Find

Your marketing team might not like the last suggestion, but they may like this one: use Slack to send new content to sales teams.

At some companies, marketers will send emails to their sales teams when they have a new product or service. But at Slack, they post those new products and services in a “Marketing Assets” chat.

Reps can find the marketing collateral they need to close deals in the same app that they use to make calls and send emails. This makes it easy to quickly find what you need, without having to search through your inbox or files.

How to Organize Your Slack Channels

Sales teams often use different tools to collaborate and share knowledge.

Here are some of our favorites.

Closed Lost Notes

When a deal is “closed lost” in Salesforce, our notes are pushed automatically to Slack. This helps us understand why some opportunities slipped through our fingers. It also allows us to improve and learn from our mistakes.

We’ve also found it helps us in marketing and sales better understand what drives sales.

While other sales tools may be built specifically for salespeople, Slack can be used by multiple departments in your company. For this reason, it’s perfect for the places where other software falls short.

Sales Gong

If you want to encourage your sales team to share more, make it more fun! A gong for closing-won deals is a fun way to do so.

Sending individual messages to your employees is a great way to avoid those “all-staff” emails that get ignored.

Sales Call Reports

Sharing your sales reports in Slack is a great way to learn from your successes and your failures. By staying up to date on the techniques, strategies, and latest trends, you can avoid repeating the same mistakes and stay on top of your game.

Customer Wins

Customer Wins are stories, tips, and tricks that you share about your customers and your wins with them.

Why You Should Add Slack to Your Sales Tools

We surveyed thousands of sales teams and over 70% said they were using unique channels for sales opportunities and top-tier clients. The trend was the same whether it was a B2B or B2C business.

There are two main reasons why this is important.

Keeping track of communications in complex deals is important. Using tools like Slack can help everyone stay in sync.

Top sales teams have figured out that using Slack is the most efficient way to communicate with their team.

By creating a dedicated channel for each of your important clients, you’ll have a chronological record of all communication, meetings, and tasks related to that client in one easy-to-access place.

This means SDRs and sales reps will have all the information they need at their fingertips.

Conclusion

Slack for sales can be a valuable tool for staying organized and connected with your team. By creating dedicated channels for important opportunities and clients, you can keep track of critical conversations, share information quickly, and stay on top of the sales process.