Ever since its $27.7BN acquisition by Salesforce in 2020, Slack has underwhelmed.
Indeed, it has failed to gain ground on Microsoft Teams, which – after scooping up most "COVID contracts" - has remained the de-facto collaborations platform.
Now, Teams has over 320MN monthly users. According to DemandSage estimates, Slack has 65MN.
Slack has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft’s "anti-competitive" bundling of Teams and 365 provided it an unfair advantage.
However, in the four years since the Salesforce acquisition, Slack has failed to live up to its potential.
Indeed, upon announcing the acquisition, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, pledged to turn the collaborations platform into a "Digital HQ" for the enterprise.
At the time, he told CNBC’s Jim Kramer:
Slack [will] provide an incredible window, a collaborative interface for all of our services and the entire enterprise.
That vision elicited images of employees leveraging Slack to collaborate on customer cases, spotlight data from across Salesforce CRM apps, and orchestrate automations between them.
In this sense, Slack would become the operational center point of a Salesforce-centric organization.
However, over the past four years, the closest Slack has got to bringing this vision to life is incident swarming for customer service and Slack Sales Elevate.
Turnover amongst senior leaders has perhaps provided a stumbling block, with Slack burning through three CEOs in 11 months in 2023.
Yet, the bottom line is that Salesforce has failed to ramp up interest in Slack from its deep CRM base. As Liz Herbert, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester, told the Wall Street Journal last year:
We don’t really see, when it comes to Slack, any pent-up demand from Salesforce’s base for a tool like that… It really hasn’t become something compelling.
Disney is one customer that did embrace the platform. However, it reportedly moved from Slack to Microsoft Teams following a data breach last month. That news broke just days after Salesforce paraded the company around Dreamforce 2024 as a revered customer.
From all this, it’s easy to frame the Slack acquisition as a continued failure for Salesforce.
However, that could all soon change. After all, at Dreamforce, Salesforce demonstrated a renewed focus on making Slack a success.
In doing so, it offered three compelling reasons why it may soon flip the Slack script.
1. Salesforce Has Completed Its Switch to Becoming a Platform Business
At Dreamforce, Salesforce announced that it had rewritten all its Customer 360 apps to develop a set of clouds that form a unified platform.
That move aided its ambition to sell the complete Salesforce stack – including Slack – rather than cross-selling various CRM applications.
Moreover, it paves the way for Slack to enable seamless cross-function data sharing, which will – in turn - increase the value of multi-cloud implementations.
