How to be Effective with your Team in Slack — Managing Leads & Prospects Edition

7 min readJul 17, 2020

There are definitely good ways and bad ways to manage customers and prospects in Slack. Working on a customer as a team can be really effective for many reasons. Pulling in the right subject matter expert on a technical question, or getting clarity on a pricing discount as fast as possible can really speed up the sales cycle. If done poorly, though, it can create more chaos. For example, Slack makes it so easy to create a customer specific channel, that I’ve seen upwards of a dozens of channels created dedicated to one specific account. I want to spell out best practices for managing a sales cycle within Slack, and this article will focus on converting leads. We’ll tackle opportunity management, onboarding, and customer success in future articles. [Shameless plug we’ll be using Centro to assist through this process]

Let’s start off with Marketing, who is generally responsible for creating awareness and often generating leads. In this example, Monica is our Marketing Operations person. The company just came off a big event (being the COVID era, it was a virtual conference), but notheless, came away with hundreds of new leads. Monica has uploaded them to Salesforce, and our fictional company Lakeview Insurance has a BDR (Business Development Rep) team that processes new leads and main goal is to qualify leads, convert them, and set meetings for Account Executives.

Let’s create a Slack channel dedicated to the function of Prospecting. Rick, our BDR leader, creates a new Slack channel called #prospecting, and invites Monica from marketing as well as his team of BDRs. This channel is where they can openly discuss best practices, share tips, assign leads and celebrate success as a team.

Open dialog between marketing and the BDR team! Imagine this being in emails back and forth — slow to react. Hanna, our BDR, can instantly react to this request. She can now pull the leads from Salesforce and look for this Rachel prospect Monica mentioned she was especially interested in. We want to be super reactive to any sales interest in these increasingly competitive times. Slack allows us to rally as a team quite effectively. Let’s keep going. Hanna calls on Centro to pull Leads without leaving Slack using the “@centro” command.

Centro search options for Salesforce records.

Applying a filter and search term against the Leads object.

Hanna is able to search in this dynamic grid view for specific leads. She can filter by Lead Status, or look for a specific lead, or both. She finds Rachel, the lead Monica was discussing. Now comes an option for Rachel: create a specific channel for this prospect, or find an existing channel. There are benefits to both. Creating a specific channel makes the context of the discussion really clear. As anyone familiar with Slack knows, channel conversations can become very long very quickly. Threads can help with context setting in longer channels, but have some drawbacks (notifications aren’t as effective, loss of context). I have a personal preference to create a channel for every customer. Why? Because of that context setting. I’ve heard arguments that channel proliferation will become too hard to manage. I contend that Slack is making channel management much easier (I wrote about this with channel Sections), and the notification system makes it easy to ignore non-active channels. I’d rather have more channels than lose context in a giant thread with many accounts being discussed at once. It’s easy to archive channels when they go dead, and Centro has plans to deal with channel proliferations. Ok, enough philosphy on Slack! For this example, we’ll be creating a new channel specific for this lead. Hanna chooses the Create a New Channel option.

Creating a specific Slack channel for this prospect.

Centro has automatically linked the lead for Rachel to this new channel. Why is this important? Furthering the context mentioned previously, Centro now can link automatically email, text messages, and new records with the Salesforce context. For example, when we convert this Lead to an Account and the Account is now linked, new Contacts will be set with the appropriate Account. Same goes for Cases, and any other related object to that linked Account. In this case, when Hanna emails Rachel using Centro, the email template will merge in the appropriate data (name, company, etc) with the context of that lead. Pretty cool!

Lead is now linked and pinned to this channel

Oh, I forgot to mention. This message is also now pinned — what’s special about that? When clicking the pinned message for this channel, you get this sort of “action center” for this customer or prospect - check out this other example:

Pinned Centro messages provide quick actions

Awesome. This concept will be very important for providing a “command center” within Slack for Salesforce data and Centro actions. We’ll cover more of this in a future article.

Back to Hanna and the team. She now drafts out an email in Slack using Centro. Her boss Rick can review and make suggestions before sending. Have you ever done this? The team opens up a Google doc and collaborate on the body of an email before sending? Centro keeps that all in context and right in the Slack channel.

Hanna and Rick agree on the email content, and press Send. Rachel, our prospect, recieves it and clicks the Calendly link to agree to a meeting. All of those interactions are captured and posted to the channel. Again, I believe that having all of these interactions in a channel is better than multiple leads coming into a single channel and loss of context begins to happen. Or the “someone else will do it” mentality occurs and no one takes ownership of the response and action to the customer. I’d rather have focus on a customer per channel than lose track of them! Centro does support both paths, but I know you’ll find that channel management isn’t as bad as you think it will be. Plus, we have your back and will clean up the inactive channels. We can see Hanna gets notified of the read, the click and the response to her email. So does everyone else in the channel in case she’s unavailable!

Notifications of email interactions from the recipient

Time for Hanna to convert the Lead. She’s done her job; she’s qualified and set a meeting for the AE (account executive) Mike. She can set the status of the Lead to Converted from within Slack, or she can open the record in Salesforce and do the conversion. Many companies who have customized the Lead process may want to force people back into Salesforce in order to double check there’s not an existing Account or Contact. We support that, and don’t want to interfere with those existing processes.

Now our AE Mike is invited to the channel, and we update the channel name to start with “acct” instead of “lead”. Why? This helps with grouping and again context setting. We could also change to “oppty-”, it all depends on how the organization chooses to manage channels. Our recommentation is to use Slack sections, rename channels when there’s major transitions, and organize by the stage of the deals.

When Mike comes into the channel, he benefits from seeing the context of the channel details. Of course, all of the interactions Hanna had are logged in Salesforce as Activities. Centro is helping to take care of the tedious nature of updating these sorts of activities, which most reps hate doing. However, these are high value data points for managing the deals. If there’s no activity with a prospect, how on earth will we convert them? Or close new business? Centro plays a big part in keeping the Salesforce investment alive with this sort of data. We want to ramp people back to Salesforce for the high value activities like creating proposals, quotes in CPQ, contracts, etc.