Salesforce, the industry-leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, has recently announced the launch of Slack Sales Elevate. Dubbed a “personalized sales home,” it’s a new array of features designed to integrate Slack’s already robust collaboration tools with the Sales Cloud, aka Salesforce’s CRM. This move will help the company continue its mission to allow businesses of all shapes and sizes to better manage not only customer data, but also sales operations, and even marketing campaigns as well.

Slack Sales Elevate also marks Salesforce’s entry into the world of artificial intelligence with open arms. AI is everywhere these days, thanks in large part to the launch of tools like ChatGPT. There has already been much discussion about how artificial intelligence has the potential to positively disrupt just about every industry you can think of, changing the way consumers interact with brands and how brands manage their affairs in a highly cost-effective, scalable way.

It would appear that the team at Salesforce agrees with this idea wholeheartedly and has designed Slack Sales Elevate as a way to take the efficiency gains inherent in AI to the next level.

At its core, Slack Sales Elevate isn’t a new product – instead, it is built into Slack, the instant messaging program that countless organizations already use for communication and collaboration. It is designed to act as a centralized repository or single source of “truth,” that consolidates all critical business data into one easy-to-use, easy-to-access environment.

The end result is that it can not only help a business simplify its own internal processes (thus freeing up valuable time to be used for more important matters), but also automate administrative tasks, and more. The end result is that sales teams will have an easier time collaborating with their peers, their partners, and most importantly their customers.

Slack Sales Elevate is fully powered by Salesforce data, ushering in a new era of productivity and collaboration among sales teams everywhere.

Salesforce put out a press release alongside the announcement, acknowledging the “growing pressure” that sales teams are constantly facing to improve productivity and “do more with less.” Doing so is not only a way to increase revenue, but to preserve what are already often razor-thin profit margins as well. These goals are important, yes – but they should never come at the expense of the high-quality customer service that consumers have come to expect. Now, thanks to Slack Sales Elevate, the team behind Salesforce hopes that businesses won’t need to make that choice.

According to Salesforce’s recent “State of Sales Report” study, it was revealed that sales representatives spend around 70% of their time at work on “non-selling tasks.” If even a fraction of that number can be automated, it can free up time when those employees can spend directly relating to and serving customers.

So not only does a tool like Slack Sales Elevate make it easier for teams to maintain the same level of customer service quality that people have become accustomed to, it actually allows them to improve it dramatically. Indeed, working “smarter, not harder” is one of the simple ideas that led to the development of the Slack Sales Elevate tool in the first place.

Customers of the Slack Business+ plan will be pleased to know that Slack Sales Elevate has already begun its formal rollout and should be available to use now. The same is true of any customers using the Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited Sales Cloud payment tiers of the tool. It is priced at just $60 per user per month.

The overall goal of Slack Sales Elevate isn’t to replace human employees at all. Instead, it is a tool designed to support and empower them – from organizational leaders all the way down to sales reps and everyone in between. It does this by giving them access to industry-leading tool sets and automation that can be used to maximize productivity in any way deemed necessary given an organization’s unique goals.

One prime example of this comes by way of Slack Sales Elevate’s artificial intelligence-powered workflows. For the first time, teams are in a position to build no-code workflows with Salesforce-triggered notifications in a matter of moments. These can include practically anything – from support requests to deal approvals and more. All this can be set up instantly without requiring any member of the team to have any extensive technical experience at all.

The example that Salesforce used has to do with new opportunities from Sales Cloud. When that new opportunity updates in Slack, an AI-powered workflow could take the data and use it to create and message a note in a particular account channel to make sure that sales representatives know to follow up. So not only does the customer get a follow-up far faster than ever, but that sales representative is also instantly armed with any information they need to close the deal.

Naturally, this has ramifications in virtually every industry you can think of. CLOUDSTREET is just one example of a provider that has implemented B2B solutions for businesses in the industrial, IT services, and consumer goods sectors.

Slack Sales Elevate’s personalized user interface also allows representatives to work with rich customer data and business insights at their fingertips. They don’t have to try to manage many different solutions or navigate across multiple windows to do so. A Slack Sales Elevate user can customize their dashboards in any way they want, complete with helpful reminders, while also tracking their individualized progress towards the KPIs (key performance indicators) that matter most to them.

It’s also important to note that the “Opportunities” view can also be quickly updated and automatically synced to Salesforce, allowing information to flow freely across the enterprise.

Another example of this idea in action would be a sales representative who wants to keep the others on their team in-the-loop on deal movements. They can toggle team-wide instant notifications that make doing so easier than ever before. This can help everyone stay up-to-date on when successful deals happen, along with new opportunities, pipeline updates, and more.

Using this type of AI-powered tool, a team manager could select to be notified whenever an opportunity changes so that they can finally have a “bird’s eye view” of what is going on. This can be a great way to identify opportunities for further coaching, empowering the entirety of their representative team through knowledge and ongoing education.

The Slack Sales Elevate tool is powered in part by Slack GPT, which is a conversational AI tool that Salesforce originally announced in May 2023. It was designed to help businesses boost productivity in multiple ways and this new integration is just one example.

In the end, artificial intelligence is here to stay – much to the benefit of businesses everywhere. When you consider how far this technology has come in a relatively short amount of time, it’s truly exciting to think about what businesses will be able to do with it over the next few months and beyond.