Salesforce has recorded a 40% growth in customers spending more than $100,000 annually on its Slack offering for the fourth consecutive quarter.
What’s more, the UC platform outperformed Salesforce’s expectations, garnering $348 million in Q1 revenues, compared to its estimates of $330 million.
The appeal of its most expensive acquisition ever perhaps highlights the success of its early integrations with the Salesforce Customer 360. Yet, it also suggests a broader trend of companies striving to achieve greater enterprise connectivity.
As Marc Benioff, Chair & CEO of Salesforce, said during a recent earnings call:
Connecting with our customers, connecting with employees through Slack, connecting with our data with Tableau, connecting with our partners, and these are major themes that we’re hearing.
Indeed, Slack plays a significant part in allowing Salesforce to offer such connectivity, encouraging cross-function collaboration. It also connects insights from various solutions within the Customer 360 portfolio, boasting deep integrations with the Sales and Service Cloud.
Companies like DoorDash – the food delivery platform – are taking advantage of the latter, harnessing blended UCaaS and CCaaS capabilities to enhance customer experiences.
As such, Salesforce supports improved contact center knowledge sharing, subject matter expert (SME) support channels, and omnichannel routing.
After sharing this DoorDash example, Bret Taylor, Co-CEO of Salesforce, added:
“We’re really excited to not only invest in Slack as a standalone platform, which is just incredible. But I’m just excited with how much more relevant our Customer 360 value proposition is now that Slack is in the building.
I think it’s going to be one of the best acquisitions we ever did, and it really makes every customer conversation more relevant in this new era of flexible work.
Taylor also suggested that “every single” Salesforce customer he had recently interacted with is currently deciding how they can sustain and improve performance in this era of flexible work.
For these companies, Slack becomes more relevant because none had a plan to return to a traditional in-office, five days a week schedule.
Realizing this potential, Salesforce has set aside a $4 billion R&D budget to speed up Slack innovation.
Mark Murphy, Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase & Co, notes that this financing may provide the opportunity to expand Slack’s native video conferencing capabilities. He also suggested:
Our survey work has shown potential for Slack to be adopted by a quarter of all employees in the next several years. It looks like a huge number above Google Workspaces, and it looks like it could be rivaling Zoom.
Elsewhere, Salesforce recorded first-quarter revenues of $7.41BN, up 24% year-over-year, again exceeding analyst expectations.
These results come after Salesforce recently teased its Summer ‘22 Release, which will include a new “Swarming” capability. The feature will enable a new workflow between Service Cloud and Slack that paves the way for enhanced communication between service teams.
