The Future of Slack and Salesforce - Updates from DreamForce

Since Salesforce's acquisition of Slack back in July for an eye-popping $27.7 billion, we have slowly started to see how the two companies will co-exist. If you're unaware, Slack is a workplace behemoth that has transformed the way remote teams work and communicate and has been a staple for hundreds of thousands of companies since the start of 2020. When Salesforce acquired them it seemed like a natural fit to expand their reach into the new work anywhere world. It's what they have dubbed, the "digital HQ" that allows organizations to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere.

Dreamforce, Salesforce's massive annual event, was held just a few weeks back where of course the focus was on the Salesforce platform. There were however quite a few announcements for how deep the marriage between Slack and Salesforce will become. Let's go over three of the biggest ones.

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Slack-First Sales

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The first one to highlight is the announcement of "Slack-First Sales" which changes the game for sales teams across the world. The introduction of "digital deal rooms" allows sales teams to collaborate in real-time with files, conversation, and most importantly Salesforce data in one place. No longer do they have to switch between multiple platforms to get the information they need. Without ever leaving Slack, they can access customer data and meeting information in one collaborative space. Add in the capability to set Slack alerts for inactive accounts and a pipeline view to monitor and manage pipeline health, and Slack-First Sales is looking like a boon to Sales teams everywhere.

These capabilities are set to be rolled out in the summer of 2022.

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Slack-First Service

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If your team is on Salesforce's Service Cloud, then their Slack-First Service is going to be a huge addition to your ticket management workflow. The introduction of Case Swarming and Incident Swarming allows service teams to automatically create channels or threads related to high-priority cases or tickets. This allows teams from all across your organization to collaborate on an incident directly in Slack without having divergent discussions on other platforms. Expert Finder is a new addition as well where you can bring in just the right people for an incident based on availability, capacity, and skills.

Expert Finder and Case Swarming are expected to be available in the Spring 2022 release while Incident Swarming is expected in the Summer 2022 release.

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Slack-First Nonprofit

The introduction of Slack-First Nonprofit will be more of an extension of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, but it's a huge one. Streamlining communication is the big feature where case managers can bring the right external parties and experts into the conversation with ease. Daily Digests and notifications will allow case managers to see their agenda and tasks for the entire day across all their clients, all within Slack. Review and Approval features allow teams to approve documents directly in Slack while syncing those approvals and changes back to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.

Slack-First Nonprofit is expected to launch with the Spring 2022 release.

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Of course, there were tons of other great Slack-focused features announced at Dreamforce, including Slack-First Marketing, Slack-First Trailhead, and GovSlack. What this shows us and the rest of the world is that the connection between Salesforce and Slack is still in its infancy stages and the two platforms are going to only become more powerful over time.

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