At Dreamforce, Salesforce Debuts Slack Canvas for Team Collaboration

Salesforce at its 20th annual Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco unveiled Slack canvas, a surface to help sales, marketing, and service teams work together in Slack, pull in actionable data directly from Salesforce Customer 360, and get more value from their digital HQ.

Slack canvas is a new surface in the digital HQ that will transform how teams curate, organize, and share critical resources. Paired with the Slack platform, anyone can customize a canvas with automation and pull in data from systems of record, like Customer 360.

Using Slack canvas paired with the new Slack platform and Customer 360, teams can bring the data they need from their systems of record into canvas and automate business-critical workflows with buttons and forms. From onboarding new hires to launching marketing campaigns to sharing executive briefings and sales account updates, teams can customize a canvas for nearly anything.

Slack canvas will help sales teams maximize effectiveness, increase productivity, and win more deals by surfacing key customer insights. Every account channel can have a dedicated canvas that includes essential information the entire account team can use and update. With Slack canvas, sales personnel can do the following:

• share important files, such as account plans, executive briefing documents, and team contacts;
• create curated lists of relevant channels needed to support accounts;
• implement common workflows, such as reporting a customer issue to engineering or approving requests;
• access opportunity, usage, and spend data from Salesforce Sales Cloud.

For service organizations, Slack canvas will streamline service agent onboarding and jumpstart productivity. In a canvas, a manager can include a checklist of items for new service agents to complete during their first week, such as joining multiple channels with the click of a button, watching training videos, and reading files. Managers can also embed automated workflows to complete tasks, like requesting a corporate phone.

Once the new agent is up to speed, the agent can integrate data from Salesforce Service Cloud into Tableau dashboards to surface customer insights from multiple channels.

With Slack, marketing organizations can deliver end-to-end, data-driven campaigns across their teams and partners. First, by pairing a canvas to a Slack Connect project channel, teams can manage every step of the campaign process from a single collaborative view that tracks all content, files, and data. As teams collaborate, they can update the canvas with links to draft email copy and mockups and to access previews of creative design files from brand and agency partners.

And with Marketing Cloud for Slack integrations, teams can set up, execute, and measure campaigns directly in Slack. Powered by Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for Slack, marketing and sales teams can leverage real-time alerts and align within Slack channels to prioritize lead follow-up, analyze pipeline impact, and iterate on campaigns instantly.

Once the campaign is live, teams can include in-flight campaign performance data using MarketingCloud's Intelligence Insights for Slack integration in the channel and canvas. This provides marketers with a custom view of campaign performance data in one place to monitor trends, align on strategy, and shift investments.

Other Slack innovations unveiled at Dreamforce included the following:

• Slack huddles, which builds on Slack's audio-first experience by offering teams lightweight video, multi-person screen sharing, message threads, and more to power live coworking sessions in their digital HQ.
• A new Slack platform for developers, with tools and modular, reusable building blocks to create, customize, and share workflows that automate work for their teams.
• Slack Partner Industry Solutions, which help customers across industries navigate digital transformations using Slack-certified consulting partners, including Accenture, Atrium, Capgemini, Deloitte, Globant, IBM, KPMG, NeuraFlash, PwC, Silverline, and Slalom, which are launching the first wave of solutions for industries such as financial services, manufacturing, communications, retail, media, and technology.

"We're focused on helping our customers navigate the future of work, whether that's hybrid, remote, or in the office," said Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer of Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce in December 2020 for nearly $28 billion. "We've been introducing capabilities like Slack Connect, clips, huddles and now canvas, that bring more value to our customers and enhance working in a digital HQ."

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