The messaging platform’s meteoric rise should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever used it. In addition to being simple and endlessly customizable, Slack has a way of improving company culture and building cross-departmental bonds based on shared interests.
It can also be a very effective tool for keeping a sales team motivated. Here are four ways that sales managers and business leaders can use Slack to engage, energize, and encourage their sellers.
With the help of a CRM integration, you can easily set up Slack notifications to appear in your #sales channel when valuable deals are closed. Take the time to publicly congratulate the sales rep who made it happen—as well as any other team members who provided important assistance—and share the news to your #general channel when whales are reeled in so that everyone in the company can offer their slackmojis-of-support as well.
To make those big wins even more festive, you can set up sound triggers to go off whenever sales are closed above a certain value-threshold—the modern equivalent of the old-school sales gong. At Nutshell, we used to have a clip of the Kool-Aid man saying “Oh yeahhhh!” that played any time a lead worth $100 or more was closed, but we eventually killed it because we were hearing it too often (#humblebrag).
Get instant Slack notifications when leads move through your pipeline, and pull up customer details directly within your #sales channels.
Sales reps thrive on friendly competition. Setting reasonable quotas and ensuring they know where they stand against their colleagues or competitors can be all the motivation they need to raise their game.
If you have the development resources, you can build an internal Slack integration to automatically post custom information to your channels such as your biggest wins of the week, a weekly ranking of your sales reps by number of completed phone calls, or how your team is performing against certain industry benchmarks.
Just be warned: Ranking your reps by raw sales numbers alone can have the opposite effect than the one you’re hoping for.
Including personalized details in cold emails and other sales communications helps build connections and makes your prospects more likely to respond. If you want to make your reps feel like rock stars, use a third-party Slack integration to automatically gather the inside information that your sellers would otherwise have to spend hours hunting down. For example…
More secret weapons in the arsenal + more time to spend on actual selling = happier, more productive sales reps.
Siloed sales teams are ineffective sales teams. As a sales manager, you can leverage Slack to foster closer bonds between your sellers and other departments, which helps deals get done faster. First order of business: Create a #sales-and-marketing channel where your sales reps can stay current on marketing initiatives in progress, and share important feedback from their prospect interactions that can help your marketing team do their jobs better.
Similarly, a #sales-and-support channel can help your customer-facing teams quickly collaborate to resolve issues for prospects and customers. Given that Slack notifications tend to grab our attention faster than an email or CRM notification, it’s perhaps the most effective way to get assistance from a teammate while you’re on the phone with a potential buyer.
Pro tip: Nutshell’s Slack integration speeds up that collaboration by automatically unfurling Nutshell links in your Slack channels, so that the important details of a customer or account can be shared with a simple copy/paste. (Our own Sales and Support teams use this all the time in conversations about in-trial users, bringing each other up to speed without having to switch back and forth between Slack and Nutshell.)
So, how does your sales team use Slack to stay motivated, collaborate more effectively, and hit their sales goals faster? Tweet your own #pro-tips to @nutshell!
This article is part of our Playbook for Managing a Sales Team.
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