Tom Pae knows how salespeople can use Slack to close more deals.

How?

Because for more than 2 years, Tom was the Sales Ops Manager at Slack’s Sales HQ in San Francisco.

As part of his responsibilities, he worked to help Slack’s sales team get the most of out of their own product. He was also part of the team that launched Troops—our Slack-to-Salesforce automation tool.

In a previous article, we shared a list of pro tips for anyone using Slack.

In this follow-up, Tom shares six additional Slack strategies specifically to help salespeople.

Note: Does your sales team use Slack? Troops’ Slack-based tools can help your team close more deals. See how it works.

Slack Sales Tip #1: Use Multi-Thread for Accounts

“For big accounts, you probably aren't selling alone. You bring in decision makers, check LinkedIn for additional connections, and build a game plan. Doing that over email is constant forwarding and various messy email threads.”

In Slack, you can gather everyone working on an account in one place.

To keep the conversation organized, respond to specific questions using a thread—a response that’s a sort of side conversation from the main thread of the channel. Just select the message you want to respond to and click in "Start a thread" to start typing.

You can even follow a thread without responding to stay in the loop even if you haven't commented.

If not everyone in a channel needs to see a response, using threads will allow you to answer questions directly or add a participant without adding to the noise of the rest of the channel.

Slack Sales Tip #2: Minimize App Switching with Troops

Context switching is bad for productivity.

“When developing sales accounts, we might be constantly switching between apps like Salesforce and LinkedIn and Slack,” Tom said. “Being able to utilize Troops to get Salesforce into Slack really minimized the action it takes to do the job well.”

Less switching means less time wasted while working to close deals.

Slack Sales Tip #3: Share Thought Leadership Articles

A channel the Sales team really benefits from at Slack is one for thought leadership.

Rather than wasting email blasts and inbox space on links to articles, Slack assigns a channel for disseminating these finds to the rest of the team.

Tom shared that, when circulating articles on concepts such as collaboration, cloud computing, or the next generation of work, they find it more effective to push these links into a channel for ideas as opposed to littering inboxes with mass emails.

Slack Sales Tip #4: Let Salespeople Help Each Other

Slack maintains a help channel for salespeople to ask for help on specific account hangups.

“This way, everyone can chime in on ways to further the opportunity or sale,” Tom told us.

As opposed to the multithreading we mentioned above (in which you may start a thread under the account and tag a specific person to answer), in a skills-specific channel, anyone following the channel can help, and anyone following the channel can also easily reference back to what will become a list of great sales tips.

If you get a great piece of advice in an account-specific channel thread, you can quickly share or quote it to the sales skills channel so others can benefit from it.

Slack Sales Tip #5: Share Successful Sales Decks

Tom recommends sales users have a Slack channel set aside for sharing sales-customized marketing collateral.

“No, marketing doesn’t love it when sales cannibalizes their decks,” he conceded, “but salespeople love getting decks from fellow sales reps, especially if those decks were proven in successful sales.

He suggests a simple label like “sales_presentations” for channels such as these.

Slack Sales Tip #6: Make Marketing Assets Easy to Find

Marketing may not love that last tip, but they might appreciate this one: Use Slack to distribute new marketing collateral to sales.

Many marketing departments just send emails to their sales teams when they have a new sales tool available. But at Slack, Marketing just drops new assets in a “Marketing Assets” channel. Because channels are searchable, sales reps can search for items using the same app they're already regularly using, without having to sift through folders or emails.

More Productivity, More Collaboration, More Sales

Slack is one of the few apps salespeople don’t seem to resist using, and we hope these tips will help your team be even more effective with the tool.

Anything you can do to empower your salespeople to use Slack more efficiently increases their odds of being more productive, more collaborative, and—ultimately—more effective at closing deals.

Note: Using Troops, your sales team can update Salesforce directly from within Slack. Want to see how it works? Sign up for a free trial.