Salesforce may also want to do more than just sell via Slack. These are all important questions for the future of marketing. Will Salesforce use Slack to bypass emails altogether by sending marketing missives via Slack by direct message? Or does Salesforce change Slack into something like an email or messaging platform open to a wider range of people? But if Salesforce allows us to search all of Slack for mentions of us – that’s marketing intelligence on steroids!Īnd here’s a side issue: If Salesforce does indeed start allowing marketing messaging through Slack, will Salesforce prevent companies that don’t use Salesforce from having access to Slack users for marketing purposes?Īs for Knak, we help create marketing emails. You can get a bit of that kind of information right now we monitor different channels (for example, there’s a channel that talks about Marketo) and look for mentions of Knak. If someone asks, “Do you use Knak and what do you think of them?” replies will generally come from genuine Knak customers and it’s likely what they say will be the unvarnished truth.īut once Slack is integrated into Salesforce, what is to prevent sales people with access to Slack channels from joining a discussion and – without disclosing their bias – offering up comments (positive or negative) about a particular product or service? Or at the very least, monitoring the discussions to see who’s thinking of making a purchase? Slack channels are perceived by many as an unbiased source of opinion. In the past, you needed to go to sales people to get information about a service or product, especially in business-to-business sales.īut now people increasingly rely on social networks for information, in the belief that recommendations from random users are less likely to be biased. Those communities play an important role in marketing right now. Salesforce will almost certainly want access to these communities, both to influence the discussion and to monitor what is going on. These allow for discussion of particular issues among Slack users from different companies. However, Slack does allow for the creation of communities or channels. No one can see what’s going on in Knak’s Slack world unless they are invited in. Slack is largely used for communicating inside a company. The way things are set up now, that doesn’t happen. That makes me believe that what Salesforce is buying is a communication channel, a way of directly accessing, for marketing purposes, the millions of Slack users. Because the cost of the Slack purchase is huge, Salesforce will be looking for a return on that investment. So my first concern is: Will Salesforce users now be able to start sending marketing messages through Slack to Slack users? ![]() Slack, as I have already noted, has upwards of 10 million daily users. Salesforce has two marketing automation platforms that allow businesses to send messages automatically to targeted customers – by email, through the Web, via social media or by text message. As those giants grow, they will be looking to dominate marketing the way Google and Microsoft and Apple dominate their sectors. (I have already written about the implications of that transaction.)Īs a result, a few marketing giants are beginning to emerge. The Salesforce-Slack transaction follows on the heels of the announcement that software giant Adobe Systems was buying Workforce, a developer of Web-based work management and project management software. There’s a lot of consolidation happening right now in the sales technology sector. Will Slack be turned into a marketing tool? As the founder of a tech company in marketing, I think I have a good feel for why Salesforce wanted to buy Slack and how it will use what Slack has to offer.Īs a result, I feel concern – concern that Salesforce will turn Slack into a marketing tool concern that Salesforce will mine Slack for marketing data and concern, too, for what that all means for the privacy of Slack users. I’ve been a Salesforce user for over a decade, and I’m a fan of Slack, having used it ever since it was rolled out. ![]() ![]() So the recent announcement that it is being bought by Salesforce, the customer relationship management (CRM) giant, is big news – almost as big as the price tag on the transaction, which is a whopping $27.7 billion U.S.īecause so many people use Slack, the transaction will have wide-ranging implications, especially if Salesforce tinkers with Slack to tilt it towards marketing instead of just communication. Slack is a popular and successful business communication tool, with upwards of 10 million active daily users.
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