10 Slack Hacks For Startups and Small Businesses

You know that every second in a small or midsize business (SMB) can make or break your game — but keeping track of every detail on your own isn’t possible. That’s where Slack (Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge — S-L-A-C-K) steps in as the place to grow your business. It connects your internal team and external partners and customers, supporting real-time, in-person, or remote communication that gets work done.

Let’s dig into the best tips and tricks SMBs rely on Slack for swapping busywork for high-impact work.

What is Slack?

Slack is a powerful communication and collaboration tool that connects people with the information, tools, or workflows they need to do their jobs.

Slack brings together the right people in one place around a shared goal, project, or initiative to create visibility and alignment across your startup or small business. With access to key information, it’s helpful to have some strategies for focusing on what’s most important to you.

10 Slack hacks for your startup

Slack is designed to be an approachable, usable, and simple software that gets you what you need when you need it. Here are some Slack hacks for your startup or SMB: 

1. Never miss a message from the people you collaborate with most

Channels and VIP DMs are standout features in Slack designed to ensure you never miss important messages. Together, these features make your communication easier and keep you organized, ensuring that high-priority messages never get lost in the shuffle.

Set up a specified channel for your team (such as #sales-team or #finance-team) to communicate helps move work forward faster, creating fewer meetings. Post important announcements, files, and updates, and finally — set channel permissions so the right people see the right things. 

With priority channels, you can prioritize (star) your most important channels, making them easily accessible and visually clear in your sidebar. This helps you quickly focus on the conversations that matter most.

VIP DMs and channels prioritize direct messages from key team members or contacts, ensuring their direct messages always rise to the top of your Slack sidebar. This feature is particularly useful for staying connected with your most important collaborators, even during a busy workday.

2. Quickly reply to routine questions with Slackbot

Slackbot is an AI-powered chatbot that can answer your questions, draft replies, set reminders, and even make suggestions. You can customize it to provide specific responses or perform certain actions based on messages your teammates share on channels or DMs. 

For example, it can quickly answer common questions like, “When is the next team meeting?” to keep people in sync without interrupting their workflow. Or if someone asks about current job openings, it can automatically pull information from your applicant tracking system (ATS) and share it in the chat.

Slackbot can also be customized to:

• Automate your tasks: Automate routine tasks like sending daily reports, tracking project progress, or onboarding new team members.
• Integrate your favorite tools: Integrate with other business tools to provide real-time updates and alerts on work as it’s being done, keeping everyone informed.
• Increase engagement: Build a more engaged team culture by sending out polls, sharing fun facts, or facilitating icebreaker activities. 

Slackbot’s Smart Replies suggest responses to messages, saving you time on crafting and executing timely emails. These replies get smarter over time, adapting to your team’s unique communication style and needs. The more you use it, the more helpful it becomes. This can help users respond more quickly to common queries or prompts. 

It helps startups with:

• Meeting confirmations: Instantly confirm or reschedule meetings with suggested replies.
• Customer support: Quickly respond to common customer queries, improving response times and satisfaction.
• FAQs: Automatically suggest answers to frequently asked questions within your team.
• Tracking tasks: Acknowledge tasks or requests with a single click, moving workflows along without disruption.

3. Automate routine tasks with Workflow Builder

Workflow Builder helps you automate routine tasks using a visual interface. It’s powered by AI to help simplify time-consuming tasks like approvals, requests, and more. When Slack owns more of the operations side, your team can focus more on ‌strategy and customer engagement. The best part is you don’t need to be tech-savvy to build a workflow. In fact, ​​80% of those who built Slack workflow don’t have a technical background.

Slack’s Workflow Builder helps you automate routine tasks and simplify processes with ease. Here’s how it can power up your startup:

• Automated approvals: Reduce unnecessary steps like ad-hoc emails for budget approval, time-off requests, deliverables, or access permissions.
• New-hire onboarding: Automate welcome messages, document sharing, and introductory tasks to get new team members up to speed quickly.
• Meeting scheduling: Simplify the back-and-forth of meeting scheduling with automated workflows that find the best time for everyone.

4. Find what you need when you need it with AI-powered search

AI-powered search helps Slack AI users save 97 mins weekly on average, making it your best time-saver and ‌knowledge hub. It delivers relevant results, understanding context to suggest pertinent messages, files, or channels. It can summarize a thread or channel to help your team members catch up on missed discussions. That means when your team goes out on vacation or has a full day of back-to-back meetings, they can get up to speed on what they missed faster than ever. You can also schedule daily recaps of your most important channels, so your team can stay aligned without reading every chapter,going through chat histories, or using search that doesn’t work.

For startups, speed is everything. Thread and recap summaries allow your team to operate with high agility by:

• Making quick decisions: Get instant access to past discussions, data, or reports without digging into long files.
• Project management: Easily locate updates, timelines, and deliverables to stay on track.
• Customer support: Resolve customer issues quickly by finding previous tickets, solutions, or customer history.
• Knowledge sharing: Effortlessly share insights and announcements.

5. Collaborate anytime, anywhere with Slack Connect

As an SMB owner, you know it’s important to have constant, clear, and effective communication with clients and partners. Slack Connect helps you to communicate securely with external stakeholders directly within the platform, eliminating the need to toggle between Slack and email. Everything lives in Slack — ensuring real-time transparency internally and externally.

Slack Connect can help SMBs combine their highest-priority conversations, enabling:

• External collaboration: Work with people from other companies, connecting your own team to your business development partners, vendors, or customers.
• Better response time: Enable faster communication and quicker responses through Slack without waiting for slow-to-respond email.
• Quicker sales cycle: Accelerate the sales process through efficient internal and external communication.

6. Use Templates to create a standardized structure for new channels

Templates, currently available on desktop only, give you the ability to customize new channels to create standardized processes across your organization. 

Templates help your company become more operationally efficient by creating clear standardization for specific channel types With a bit of customization, Slack can automatically create new channels that have a pre-populated Canvas, Slackbot that requests team updates every Friday afternoon, and a standardized project tracker via Lists. With these tools, you can:

• Send messages faster: You can send the same Slack messages to different teammates at the same time and get eyeballs on it faster than any email in an inbox.
• Be consistent: Templates create consistency and require minimal effort for repeatable conversations and actions.
• Build your own rhythm: You can build your own specific template according to how your team gets things done.

7. Skip the wall of text, send a Clip instead

With Clips, you can record audio or video messages to your team so you can deliver important updates with more authenticity and less text. Simply record and post audio, video, and screen recordings to communicate easily with your team, regardless of their time zone or location. Your team can also play the Clips back, watch with captions, or read the transcript. Use clips to share ideas and updates, or just to say hello, it’s up to you. 

8. In-the-moment huddles > scheduled meetings

Huddles are another way to help ‌reduce meeting overload. Hardly anything is as stressful as a calendar full of meetings. But for SMBs, Slack  can reduce the chaos of days of back-to-back meetings by giving your team more time to get work done. With one tap, you can open an audio or video chat in your channel or DM and start knocking out ad-hoc items for discussion.

9. Send your messages at the right time with Schedule Send

Give yourself peace of mind with schedule send. Scheduling messages to send at a future date and time is a great way to get communication to-do’s off your plate quickly and ensure you won’t forget a crucial piece of information. Know that your announcement, meeting agenda, or other important message will be delivered to the team right on time, even if you’ll be handling something else or away from the screen at the time.

Best of all, it’s super easy to do! Here’s how:

1. Compose your message like you always do. 
2. Instead of clicking “Send” or immediately hitting “Enter,” click the downward arrow just to the right of the Send button.
3. Choose one of the suggested times, or schedule your message to post at a custom time of your choosing.

And don’t forget one of our all-time favorite features: ‘Remind Me Later’. That one speaks for itself when you’re busy up to your ears and get assigned something in Slack ‘remind me later’ will popup when you have the time to dedicate to it. 

10. Get smarter with Agentforce

Slack’s intelligence gets an upgrade with Agentforce and its AI agents. You can combine your real-time Slack conversations with trusted enterprise data to provide accurate answers, context, and even act for you, like creating channels or updating project canvases.

But it just doesn’t end here. There’s more:

• Build your own agent: You can customize or build your own AI agents using low-code tools, or use ready-made agents from partners like Adobe or Workday, all integrated within Slack.
• No security concerns: Agentforce prioritizes your data privacy and security. You control what agents see, and customer data never trains external AI models.
• Multitasking gets easier: You can multitask with a split-view interface, letting you chat with agents while working elsewhere in Slack.

Hack Slack for your small business

Slack is where your business gets done. It connects everyone in your organization to the apps, vendors, customers, and data needed to work efficiently. These hacks are just the beginning of how you can get more done using Slack. 

Start your journey with Starter Suite today. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations today to try Agentforce.

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.