Salesforce has launched Slack Sales Elevate, a personalised sales home that integrates Slack’s collaboration platform with Sales Cloud and contains AI-powered features.

Slack Sales Elevate is built into Slack, offering a hub that centralises information, simplifies processes, and automates administrative tasks in the platform where sales teams already collaborate with peers, partners, and customers. The solution is also powered by Salesforce data, empowering productivity and collaboration among sales teams.

Rob Seaman, SVP of Product at Slack, commented:

Bringing Sales Cloud into Slack and providing new sales productivity tools and automation in Slack helps sellers save time and access the right people and information to make better decisions. A Slack-based approach to selling will make it easier than ever for Sales Cloud customers to focus on the work that matters: working with customers and closing deals.”

Salesforce’s press release highlighted the growing pressure sales teams are under to improve productivity and revenues while maintaining high-quality customer service. Salesforce’s internal “State of Sales Report” suggested that sales representatives spend 70 percent of their work time on non-selling tasks — a catalyst for Slack Sales Elevate’s origin.

Slack Sales Elevate is generally available now for customers of Slack Business+ plans and above, as well as Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Sales Cloud versions. It is priced at $60 per user per month.

A Holistic and Compelling Feature Set

Slack Sales Elevate intends to empower sales teams, from leaders to reps, with the best toolsets and automations to maximise productivity.

One of the most eye-catching new features is Elevate’s AI-powered workflows. Teams can build AI-powered, no-code workflows with Salesforce-triggered notifications. These encompass support requests and deal approvals without requiring any technical expertise.

An example suggested by Salesforce is that when a new opportunity from Sales Cloud updates in Slack, a workflow could leverage that data to create and message a note in an account channel to flag to the sales rep to follow up.

Elevate’s personalised sales home UI allows reps to explore rich customer data and business insights in a single-pane-of-glass in Slack. Users can customize their space with informative reminders and track progress towards their KPIs. The solution also includes a thorough view of opportunities that can be straightforwardly updated and automatically synced to Salesforce.

Users can inform the rest of the team on deal movements through the offering’s instant account configurations by toggling team-wide instant notifications. This helps colleagues stay informed on successful deals, fresh opportunities, and pipeline updates.

A manager could opt-in to be notified when opportunities change to identify coaching opportunities for reps better. Those changes are then automatically piped to a record-mapped Slack channel to keep the sales account team up to date.

The Elevate hub also institutes the most effective best practices for producing processes. Teams can access creative process templates or Slack canvases generated for executive briefings and mutual close plans. This should enable more straightforward and quicker process creation, especially since it automatically includes their Salesforce data.

Slack GPT and Salesforce’s History with AI So Far

Elevate is partly powered by Slack GPT, which Salesforce first announced in May and is a conversational AI tool to boost business productivity.

The new technology leveraged CRM and conversational data and introduced AI features into Slack, generative AI app integrations, and the function to utilise customer insights through the Customer 360 and Data Cloud.

Slack GPT brought AI natively into the Slack user experience to enable customers to be more productive. Specific features included AI-powered summaries of message threads that users may have missed as a time-efficient way of catching up without reading every comment. Slack GPT could also attend huddles on a user’s behalf and provide a recap with the most important takeaways.

“Generative AI has enormous potential to redefine how work is done and unlock significant business productivity,” said Slack’s CEO, Lidiane Jones.

“The real power of this technology is when AI can analyze and act on the most valuable data from a company’s most trusted resource — its own internal knowledge. Slack GPT is the conversational AI platform of the future, helping organizations easily tap into their trusted customer data and essential employee knowledge so they can work smarter and make smarter decisions faster.”

The arrival of Slack GPT followed the release of Salesforce’s Einstein GPT. Salesforce announced Einstein GPT generative AI in March in what it said was a “world first” for CRM.

According to Slack, Einstein GPT’s new AI model would focus on content for “every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyper-scale”.

However, Slack GPT provides more advanced agent-assist innovations within the Service Cloud application than Einstien GPT.

A $250 million generative AI fund was set up with Salesforce Ventures, the global investment wing of the company, this year. It aims to reinforce the startup ecosystem by investing in new businesses with impressive potential while focusing on secure and responsible AI development.



from UC Today https://ift.tt/EqD9pky