A week after the news broke that Salesforce were looking to acquire Slack, the
deal is done - we knew it would be, so that it could be announced at the
Dreamforce to You keynote. It turns out that talks started some time ago, but
with
Slack talking to Salesforce about an acquisition of Quip. This would have been a real surprise, as I can't recall Salesforce ever
selling on an acquisition, although they have shut a few down (including my
favourite todo list,
do.com).
In my
previous post
I touched a little on why Salesforce would need another tool to collaborate
outside of the Salesforce instance, and I've been thinking more about this.
Chatter
Chatter is a great tool for collaboration around Salesforce data,
allowing you to combine structured information in the record detail
and related records with unstructured data in the chat. You can see
the historic discussion around changes to the record, not just which
fields changed, and understand more about the lifecycle of a record.
Did a case involve pulling in additional teams, did a Sales manager
have to chase up a rep to progress an opportunity. All of this is
valuable information which is hard to capture on a record without
having a million related records.
Chatter groups are also useful in the context of Salesforce data.
Being able to @mention a group regarding a record, using the same
example from above, if there was a case that required a specialist
team you could get their attention with a single post. They are less
good at general collaboration in my view - while I use groups a lot,
it's for headline type posts - announcements or asking if anyone has
seen a specific problem before. But only for the initial contact. Once
the protagonists are identified, any further collaboration is
typically carried out via Google Chat, Slack, email or
videoconference. Essentially I find hem a way to get the attention of
the right collection of people.
I don't think Chatter was helped by the investment drying up after a
few bumper years. The desktop application lagged way behind the web
interface, and was eventually withdrawn, even though it was pretty
popular. But the key sticking point to expanding to the wider company
is the org-centric aspect. If you have multiple orgs, then people need
to maintain multiple logins, which is a bit easier with mobile app as
can easily switch, but still not ideal. You also need to be very clear
which is the correct org for collaboration, even if it's around
something happening in another org. There were some third party
solutions around providing single view of chatter across orgs, but
generally these replicated posts across orgs and required additional
licenses for the ISV product and often something like Heroku
orchestrating the transfers. You also can't integrate inside the feed
like you can with a tool like Slack, although you can do a bit more
around the feed with Lightning Experience pages. Automatic
notifications also felt quite antiquated, as for a long time you had
to construct a post through the Connect API, @mention someone, then
detail what it was you wanted to alert them about. This has
improved since the advent of process builder and custom notifications,
but was introducing features that other tools had for years. Once Quip
came along, that felt like Chatter was heading down the maintenance
only route.
Employee Communities
Communities were another attempt to introduce collaboration across the
enterprise, and replace the intranet, that didn't make it. What most
companies wanted were a simple way to create a related set of pages
(Google sites anyone?) for intranet type content and a way to
collaborate on the content. What they got was a $20/user/month
platform-lite style license, that pretty much guaranteed limited
take-up. For example, I was working with a 4,000 person company who
wanted to migrate their intranet to Salesforce. They had 300 or so
existing Salesforce users, so needed around 3,700 community licenses,
which would lead to a bill of around $75,000 per month, for an
intranet that people would use to find someone's phone number or
figure out how to book holiday! Yes they could access up to 10 custom
objects, but the vast majority had no interest in that. Without
reasonably priced, login-based, entry level licenses, the employee
community was always going to be priced out of the market. The
employee community license was eventually withdrawn and users
transitioned to a platform user license with a company communities for
force.com permission set, which feels like what was actually being
sold.
Slack
Against a dedicated solution like Slack, aimed at the entire company
rather than specific groups of users, it was always going to be a
difficult battle. Acquiring Slack gives Salesforce access to the
entire enterprise, especially if they stick with the free tier. Yes
you don't get the history, but important information should not be
stored in chatlogs. If people have to search back through the history
of chats they may not have been involved in to find something they
need, you're doing it wrong.
Where the chat history is important, as mentioned earlier, is when it
is colocated with a record, and this is why I think chatter will live
on after the acquisition - people won't switch to another tool to
search for any messages related to the record they are currently
viewing.
Slack may have lost $147 million last two quarters and may not have
seen the growth that other tools have during the pandemic, but they
also haven't had the unstoppable force of Salesforce Sales and
Marketing pushing it. According to Marc Benioff,
90% of Slack customers are also Salesforce customersOnce the machine is tooled up to sell Slack, I'd expect the numbers
to trend towards this in reverse - a massive existing customer base,
existing access to the upper echelons of leadership, and a motivated
(incentivised) Sales operation will, I believe, lead to a large amount
of Salesforce customers becoming Slack customers.
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