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In sales, visibility is 100% about improving sales numbers and hitting goals. Without visibility into individual opportunities, you can’t quickly pivot to highest priorities. Without visibility into total pipeline and metrics around time to close, you can’t forecast. Essentially, if the right level of visibility isn’t there, people can’t do their jobs well.
Slack is a place that modern sales teams can get visibility and close more deals by leveraging integrations, fostering collaboration, and sharing information throughout the entire organization.
Here’s how to use Slack to bring the right level of visibility to your sales team:
+ Crowd source knowledge, fast
There are tons of studies that suggest lead response time is critical to how likely you are to close a deal. When you get someone inbound, your SDRs may need to know if anyone has sold in this space before, had a pitch that worked well, or has any other contacts or references related to the lead. Slack is the perfect place to crowd source knowledge and leverage the team aspect of a sales team. If this inbound moves to meeting held, the whole team is going to feel excited because they all played a part.
+ Access content and collateral in one central place
Marketing teams spend a ton of time creating content for sales enablement, and it's reported that about ⅔ of it goes unused. But content is crucial when it comes to closing deals.
Forrester Research shows that 78% of executive buyers claim sales reps aren’t sharing relevant examples with them in the buying process. That's probably because people don’t know where to find it or marketing never knew this was the need. Slack makes file searching and sharing super simple. It's the one-stop shop for searching to see what exists. It also allows marketing to hop into sales channels and remind the team they have *just* the thing for an upcoming sales call.
+ Use triggers as a digital sales gong
Sales teams have a longstanding tradition of ringing a sales gong. Celebrating and recognizing wins goes a long way with making your reps feel appreciated and creates a rewarding work experience where people can thrive. And a positive culture is actually what leads to closing more deals (not the other way around!).
In today’s world, more people are working remotely, rendering the gong a little bit obsolete. And you know what a sales floor gong doesn’t do? Provide insight into some important details about the deals being closed. Use triggers to blast into slack when meetings are set, opportunities are converted, and deals are closed to not only recognize your reps and fuel them to do more, but to allow visibility into the size and specific details of the deals!
+ Get those expansions
Research shows that loyal customers can be worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase! Part of getting expansion or add-on business from existing customers is simply knowing the right time to ask. This is where Slack comes in — to provide visibility across Customer Success and Sales teams.
Customer Success reps can manage channels for clients and tag in sales reps who own the account when important events are happening. Did the manager hint at hiring? Let’s talk about more licenses. Did they just open an East Coast office? The sales rep can get all of the good intel and reach out the right way, at the right time, for the upsell.
+ Energy, camaraderie, team bonding, culture!
This bears repeating. When it comes to selling more, culture comes first. For a long time people wondered if sales floors were happy because reps were closing deals or if reps were closing deals because they were happy. And it turns out, it's the latter!
Slack is a place where people work, but it's also a place to interact and bring teams together. Every trigger that fires into Slack for a new meeting, opportunity, or deal is a place where the team cheers each other on and encourages one another. It's the perfect place to establish a team culture.
