How Salesforce’s Acquisition of Slack Will Reshape the Market

Salesforce acquiring Slack has been the talk of the town for a while. The deal finally got a green light on December 01, 2020, when Salesforce, the CRM powerhouse, bought Slack for a whopping $27.7 billion.

Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, called the acquisition ‘a match made in heaven’ and we couldn’t agree more!

Salesforce has recently added applications and data integration with Mulesoft and business intelligence and analytics with Tableau. By adding Slack to its pack, Salesforce has set a solid foot into the communication and collaboration space.

Although Salesforce has tried to move into the collaboration space in the past with Chatter, Community Cloud, and Quip, it didn’t particularly yield the result that Salesforce wanted.

So, how is this move different?

Let’s understand how this acquisition will reshape the way digital natives work in the new marketing era.

What Does This Acquisition Mean for the Market?

Salesforce’s powerful CRM capabilities enable companies to sell, service, market, and conduct business from anywhere. And, Slack unites people, data, and tools so that teams can collaborate and get their work done from anywhere.

Salesforce’s biggest CRM competitors have collaboration platforms. Microsoft has Teams and its integration with Office 365 and Adobe has Workfront.

Acquiring Slack finally gives Salesforce the boost it’s been looking for in the collaboration space. Now, it can focus on customer-facing tools and address the market for employee engagement.

Slack’s open platform integrates with 2400 apps like Zendesk, Google Drive, Zapier, Box, Trello, Dash, Hive, etc. Slack’s 12 million daily users will contribute revenue and provide data to feed into Salesforce’s AI projects.

The united front of Salesforce and Slack impacts Microsoft. This is because Slack will now be at par with Microsoft’s Teams which has been giving strong competition to Slack since the shift towards remote working accelerated. For Microsoft, this would competitively change the landscape and make these two behemoths compete head on over this cloud opportunity.

With Salesforce, Slack will be able to expand its presence with the big names. And with 90% of Fortune 500 companies as Salesforce customers, this will be a huge advantage for Slack to grow their share of enterprise customers while doing what they do best – innovate.

What Could be the Implications of This Acquisition on Users?

The fusion of the two will create a new ‘operating system’ which will enable companies to succeed in the new digital landscape. With a single source of truth, organizations will have a unified platform that connects employees, customers, and partners with each other and the applications they use every day, all within their existing workflows.

It will help organizations:

• Create connected customer experiences
• Reduce complexity
• Improve flexibility for employees
• Enhance organizational alignment and agility
• Boost overall productivity

Salesforce plans to combine Slack with its Salesforce Customer 360 software and make Slack its new interface. This will transform and improve how employees communicate, collaborate, and take action on customer information across Salesforce and all other business apps and systems.

Slack could be useful for organizations to facilitate conversations between sales teams, customers, and can also play a huge part in customer service.

The recently-launched Slack Connect extends the benefits of Slack to enable communication and collaboration with external partners, from vendors to customers.

Salesforce has a large enterprise app ecosystem and with the capabilities of Slack, it can create a strong open ecosystem of apps and workflows for businesses which will empower developers to collaborate, innovate, and create useful applications that delight customers.

What Does the Future Look Like?

By acquiring Slack, Salesforce envisions future revenue and growth based on all the powerful things Slack can do as a part of Salesforce. However, integrating Slack into its operations could be tricky for Salesforce, and as with its previous deals, it could allow Slack to operate at an arm’s length initially. This acquisition is just the first step towards the future in the way we work, collaborate, and automate workflows and business processes in the cloud.

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