Canva rewrites how enterprise sales get done with Salesforce.

Launched in 2013, Canva is an online visual communication platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Canva operates in 190 countries with more than 240 million monthly users, and has powered the creation of more than 35 billion designs.

Scale and mature enterprise sales processes to support more strategic customer relationships.

In the early years of Canva, most of its users were consumers and professionals within startups and small businesses. Around five years ago, that started to change as visual communication became a universal need. 

Canva responded to this demand with Canva Enterprise, a purpose-built enterprise offering, supported by an enterprise sales team. The team turned to Salesforce to quickly build up its sales team and manage relationships globally. 

Now, Salesforce is helping Canva rewrite how enterprise sales gets done and cultivate more strategic, value-driven relationships. It has also helped the business seamlessly scale enterprise sales, with the team doubling in size over the last 12 months.

Single source of truth helps fuel stronger relationships and growth. 

Canva is always challenging the status quo. When scaling its enterprise sales team, the goal wasn’t to copy traditional playbooks - it was to design a motion that mirrors how customers actually discover, adopt, and grow with Canva.

Sales Cloud provides a backbone for Canva’s unique go-to-market motion, serving as a single source of truth for every customer interaction and enabling the business to take the right actions at the right time to accelerate deals. 

For example, even the largest enterprise customers often begin their journey when a user signs up with Canva online. Canva uses a custom reporting structure to track each company’s engagement from this point through to when they become an enterprise customer. Canva relies on Sales Cloud to bring this information together and identify where customers are in their journey, as well as how to guide them forward.

“Salesforce helps us spot the signals of where Canva can create the most impact - so we can focus our energy on building deeper, more strategic partnerships with those customers,” said Jessica Chiew, Global Head of GTM Strategy and Operations, Canva. 

This focus on building more strategic, trusted relationships has supported Canva’s expansion into the enterprise with 95% of Fortune 500 companies now using the platform. 

Salesforce provides the foundation for automation and agentic AI.  

Beyond providing key insights to strengthen customer relationships, Sales Cloud acts as a system of record to power workflow automations. These include automations enabled by AppExchange apps, such as LeanData for lead routing, Gong.io for conversational intelligence, and Ironclad for contract lifecycle management. 

“Our approach is based on partnering with customers and meeting them where they are in their journey. Salesforce is an essential part of that, acting as our system of record for every interaction, insight, and next step,” said Chiew. “Our focus now is how we use this data to better work as one team and automate workflow to reach customers with the right messages, at the right time.”

The data foundation established in Sales Cloud is also helping Canva deliver on its vision for agentic AI. 

"Agentic AI provides us with a huge opportunity to rethink our workflow, so humans can focus on the tasks that only humans can do, while our systems take care of the rest. It's not about efficiency or cost reduction, but about reaching more customers in more meaningful ways," said Chiew. 

Slack provides a single work operating system for the sales team.

Canva has used Slack for over a decade to connect teams across time zones.  It has become the central nervous system for how teams communicate and collaborate, and automates 1,200 workflows. 

One workflow scans sales reps' calendars for meetings with prospects and customers, then executes research on companies and contacts and delivers consolidated overviews to reps via direct messages in Slack—24 hours before each meeting. This eliminates manual research and ensures that reps are better prepared, enabling them to act as strategic partners to their customers. 

True to its commitment to innovation, Canva has recently embraced Slack AI. Already, it is helping teams stay on top of what matters by summarising channels and threads and serving up daily recaps.

Salesforce provides Canva with a single source of truth that supports the unique sales motion of its enterprise sales team. For example, Canva can track its customers' complex journey from when a user first signs up online to when the company becomes an enterprise customer. Canva can also take the right actions at the right time to guide customers forward in their journey.

Salesforce and Slack integrate with several apps used by Canva to power automation and centralise workflow. 

Abhijit Sakhardande, Head of B2B Sales Technology at Canva, shared that integrating these apps with Salesforce enables the business to benefit from a platform approach while also leveraging a plethora of tools to meet specific needs. 

“While we use several tools to automate our sales workflow, at the end of the day, it is all made possible by Salesforce, which provides the context and data they rely on,” said Sakhardande. 

Canva continues to innovate and streamline workflow, working with consultants and partners like Brillio to maximise Salesforce’s out-of-the-box functionality and enhance processes such as quote-to-cash. 

The business is also bringing more workflows and apps into Slack. "As we introduce new tools, Slack provides a 'front door' where people can surface or interact with information right in the flow of work. This is especially useful where we are using automation and AI and want to keep a human in the loop without requiring people to use multiple tabs or user interfaces," said Chiew.