Slack's head of partnerships explains why it's deepening its relationship to Salesforce with a bunch of new integrations
- Slack and Salesforce are expanding their partnership, so their joint customers can collaborate more easily using both tools.
- Brad Armstrong, Slack VP of business and corporate development told Business Insider that these new integrations came about after hearing what customers wanted.
- "We're working a lot more closely now to present these integrations to our joint customers and new customers by going to market together," Armstrong told Business Insider.
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Customers using both Slack and Salesforce will now be able to move more seamlessly between both popular cloud services.
Today, the companies announced an expansion of their existing partnership, first struck in late 2016. The deal came about in large part due to customer demand, Brad Armstrong, Slack VP of Business and Corporate Development, told Business Insider.
"It's really about the increasing demand from our customers and meeting what they want to see in terms of collaboration between them," Armstong said. "So for both of us, we're pleasing our customers by doing this."
The new features are aimed at helping customers more efficiently collaborate across both tools - it means that Slack's 12 million monthly active users can search for and share Salesforce customer records without leaving the chat app. It also means that conversations on Slack can be appended directly to Salesforce.
Armstrong said that sales and service professionals - Salesforce's core customer demographic - are a growing part of Slack's user base, which makes these kinds of integrations valuable to them. These updates apply to Slack's existing integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud, its flagship customer relationship management (CRM) product. It will include Salesforce's Service Cloud, for customer support and other frontline workers, as well.
Slack and Salesforce first partnered up three years ago, to offer basic collaboration to customers using both tools. Armstrong said in those three years the partnership has grown tremendously.
"We have a much better understanding of what customers want between these systems and how they want to interact with them than we did before, and then the product engagement has grown," Armstrong said.
Salesforce's Ryan Aytay, Executive VP of Strategic Partnerships and Quip co-CEO, echoed those comments in a blog post. "This tighter integration between Salesforce and Slack is a key way for us to dramatically streamline how our joint customers work," Aytay said.
As previous Salesforce executive, Armstrong said his previous knowledge of the company and its workflow helped this partnership thrive. He said that Salesforce is very forward-looking as a partner.
When working with larger enterprise software vendors, Armstrong said they try to learn as much as possible from the companies, to understand how to best collaborate. Slack, to Armstrong's mind, represents a new way for colleagues and coworkers to talk to each other, and Salesforce has been ahead of the curve in adapting to this new reality.
"They know customers really well and we in these partnerships try to learn as much as possible and to really bring our point of view there because were representing a new way of working and a new paradigm, and there's compromises along the way," he said.