4 Ways to Use Slack to Motivate Your Sales Team

With eight million daily active users around the globe as of July 2018, Slack is rapidly replacing email as the go-to means of workplace communication.

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.

1. Celebrate individual wins

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.

 

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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).

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2. Set up an automated leaderboard

Sales reps thrive on friendly competition, and knowing 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.

3. Arm your reps with inside information

As we’ve discussed before, including personalized details in 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…

  • DataFox provides real-time alerts in your Slack channels when one of your current prospects or existing customers announces a milestone like hiring a key executive or launching a new initiative—giving you a nice conversation starter for checking in or upselling. The app also alerts you when a new company meets your prospect criteria (based on their location, industry, headcount, or annual revenue, for example).
  • GrowthBot is a sales and marketing integration that answers any prospect- and competitor-related question you throw at it. Want to see a list of companies in your state that use a rival’s product? GrowthBot will fetch it for you. Need a “personality profile” for a new prospect to help you prepare for a presentation? Amazingly, GrowthBot can do that too, based on the person’s public postings. It’s the ambitious, hard-working intern you’ve always wanted.
growthbot

More secret weapons in the arsenal + more time to spend on actual selling = happier, more productive sales reps.

4. Unify your sales team with other departments

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.

support channel

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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