Dreamforce recap 3: Slack with Michael Peachey

From a marketing perspective, our number one job is to reach people across that hybrid world and convey messages and value in formats and on channels that work for them. Michael Peachey, SVP, Slack Enterprise Marketing at Salesforce explores how Slack enables marketers to do exactly that by creating a Digital HQ from which to connect with their partners and customers.

Think about it: no one has been putting up billboards on the highway while everyone was in lockdown. Our customers are at home, engaging with content in a digital first way more than ever before. And the shift to digital first is only set to intensify, with 68% of customers saying they’re online more often than not, and 58% expecting to do more online shopping after the pandemic than before.

Fortunately marketers are very agile and adaptive. Indeed, 84% of marketers say customer expectations are changing their digital strategies. Marketers want to be relevant and meet their customers where they are with messages that resonate with them.

How a Digital HQ promotes collaboration and productivity

Creating those messages has become a far more collaborative process. It involves bringing together teams of experts in design, content, advertising, technology and sales. Even the customer can be part of that collaboration and message-making. 

Indeed, collaboration is one of the great strengths of creating a Digital HQ with Slack. It can make your partners and customers feel like a part of your team. It brings them in close so they become integral to the action, not just an audience to it. 

With Slack, we are no longer dependent on endless email threads or eight hours a day of Zoom calls for sharing information. Instead, communication can be team-based or project-based. The channel format allows a group of people to come together around a single problem to solve or a campaign to launch. As HBO Max’s Trailblazers said at Dreamforce, it’s about working smarter, not harder and that’s exactly what Slack’s Digital HQ makes possible. 

Slack allows for a seamless flow of information between your teams and partners. Responses are faster and subsequently campaigns get to market more quickly. You can market at the speed of your customer. And productivity improves as marketers operate more efficiently to deliver on the needs of their business. 

Again with HBO Max’s session at Dreamforce, we heard just how crucial this delivery on business goals is for marketers. When marketing is held accountable for every media dollar, a tool that can help streamline the collaboration and campaign-building process and get it to market at speed, is critical to measuring ROI.

Using Digital HQ to connect data and systems — with a human touch

Slack allows you to bring the systems and data you need to where the conversations are happening and the decisions are being made. 

Instead of having to log into separate dashboards and dig around for the data you need, you can integrate apps and workflows with Slack, allowing you to view and query data right within your Digital HQ. Using Datorama for Slack, for instance, pulls campaign information and delivers it directly into the Slack feed. 

As Dreamforce Trailblazers Momentive and Amazon Business Team shared in their sessions, real-time access to a single source of truth — where data from disparate sources is gathered — is critical to connecting the right solutions with the right customers. And when you have 345,000 customers, as Momentive does, then getting those connections right is essential. It’s only with a rich knowledge base of data around every customer that personalised connections become possible.

Transforming the way we work to flourish in a hybrid workplace

We don’t have the advantage anymore of being in a room together to brainstorm and write and talk and come up with campaign ideas. 

But a Digital HQ gives us other advantages if we are willing to transform the way we work. And it’s not simply a matter of translating the way we did things before into how we have to operate today, of taking that brainstorm room and just creating a digital version of it. 

Instead, it’s about transforming the way work happens, blending asynchronous work with synchronous work. This means working together through different time zones and across teams that might be globally distributed. With a Digital HQ, this truly hybrid form of work can flourish. 

Take the example of how Salesforce integrated and launched Slack: we used Slack to do it! It would have been far more difficult to do so in the old way of operating with emails and Zoom calls. A Digital HQ, on the other hand, enables precisely the flexibility that the hybrid work world needs. 

With Slack tools like Huddles, Clips and Case-swarming, organisations don’t just replace the office-based forms of communication. They transform and elevate them to create fresh ways for marketing and sales teams to connect and deliver customer-focused solutions.

Huddles, for example, give the opportunity for more spontaneous conversations, while Clips supersede the need for synchronous calls by allowing video updates and messages to be delivered and consumed at a time and place that suits the sender and the recipient. 

Case-swarming enables expert input at speed on a particular problem so a customer issue can be resolved quickly. 

And all of these features of Digital HQ can work for organisations of any size. You don’t have to be a multinational to embrace the hybrid working world that Slack can enable. The Digital HQ is democratic. It’s available to every marketer who knows the way forward is to embrace the new — hybrid — normal. 

Hear more from the Trailblazers embracing Digital HQ for Marketing with Dreamforce on-demand: Grow Moments into Relationships with Slack-First Marketing session