Slack teams up with Salesforce to tap enterprise clients

With 3 million active daily users and 9,30,000 paid users, workplace chat app, Slack has entered into what it describes as a “deep product partnership” with CRM giant Salesforce. The integration is aimed at making it much easier for businesses to share data across the two platforms, specifically around employee conversations and sales account information. With this integration, the messaging platform gets a new opportunity to expand its user base beyond tech startups, especially to the giant corporations and expand the company’s reach.

“The possibilities of what you can do to connect Slack and Salesforce are many — whatever is currently documented in Salesforce can be piped into Slack easily, which helps our team at Slack stay on the same page,” read the Slack blogpost.

Exciting news: we’re partnering with Salesforce to bring you new (and useful) integrations. https://t.co/f9W7NMbyMd pic.twitter.com/SV12434crF

— Slack (@SlackHQ) September 27, 2016

So what’s new?

Under the new partnership, users can search for information stored in Salesforce directly from Slack. All they need to do to bring data from Salesforce into the conversation is give the command “/salesforce”. The search will return three results, and when one is clicked, it will expand to provide core Salesforce account details.

Furthermore, Salesforce employees can create a new Slack channel without leaving the CRM platform. And the latter will automatically be able to sync with Salesforce’s own embedded chat tool, Chatter, via either a “/chatter” or “/slack” command to get updates from either system.

“We’re always looking to help companies better communicate and collaborate around sales, marketing and customer service,” said Ryan Aytay, EVP of Strategic Product Alliances, Salesforce, in a statement.

“And our integration with Slack allows us to offer our customers a better experience by partnering with best of breed technology. We’ll continue to evolve and improve the ways Salesforce and Slack work together.”

If sources were to be believed, the integration resulted from a nine-month endeavor from both the teams, stimulated by rampant requests from their customers. The move is reportedly Slack’s biggest partnership to date, and the integrations are set to go live in October.