Plus, email, calendar and a unified communication platform including voice and video – all of which Slack and Salesforce lack. Also, you get Teams for free with Microsoft Office.

It may not be as slick as Slack, but no one would contest that Teams is pretty darn good enough.

Microsoft has an army of sellers who know exactly how to sell Teams. Teams was the safe and easy choice, not Slack. As CIOs tightened operations, they were left to choose between the app that employees adopted on their own in smaller pockets or the messaging product that comes bundled with their existing, familiar, InfoSecurity-approved Microsoft Office suite. Then came the pandemic, and suddenly a lot of companies that had never invested in modernizing remote work infrastructure felt the need to ramp up quickly. Adoption snowballed in that organic growth phase. Slack built its reputation on an excellent user experience, becoming a phenomenon that its users – starting with developers, designers, marketers, venture capitalists, and journalists – fell in love with. So, while its tempting to think Slack’s bottom-up, product-led growth can be easily complemented with the top-down enterprise sales motion, reality is more complicated than that. While Salesforce has one of the industry’s best sales teams, the sales motion needed to sell a company-wide communication solution to a CIO is very different from one that’s all about selling business value based solutions to a departmental leader like the VP of Sales, Customer Support or Marketing. The per-user fee they can charge for a collaboration app is nowhere near what they can charge for CRM. While the architectural issues were significant, I think the underlying issue was that Chatter is not the sort of product Salesforce was set up to sell effectively. Database software and unstructured communication software like Chatter or Slack represent completely different branches of computer science. Some of the issues were technical – Salesforce is a database-centric company, founded by Oracle alums on a relational database foundation. However, building it into a product that could inspire broad corporate adoption challenged us – the Super Bowl ads didn’t help either 😜. While there are plentiful product synergy possibilities between Salesforce and Slack, I am less optimistic about the revenue synergies I’m sure investors are hoping to see out of this deal in the long term.īack in the 2009 to 2011 timeframe, Salesforce invested heavily in making Chatter as a “social business” application with tight CRM integration. Could the combination of Salesforce, Quip and Slack be a credible threat to Microsoft? Not So Fast Back in 2016, they bought Quip as a shot across the bow to Redmond, to challenge its document collaboration business (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint). This isn’t the first time Salesforce has made a move into Microsoft’s territory.

Salesforce’s ultimate nemesis is Microsoft and what better way to poke them in the eye than to buy the competitor to their fastest growing product, Microsoft Teams. What better market to buy into than employee collaboration, as companies rush to invest in future-of-work technologies amidst a pandemic? As tempting as Zoom’s quadrupling revenue is, it’s too big to buy.īut we all know it’s not just about the economics of the deal. Salesforce’s stock price is fueled by revenue growth, and as their organic growth slowed, they have turned into an acquisition machine to buy their way into revenue growth. And what better company to buy than the darling of the modern collaboration market? Makes Dollars and Sense Marc has always been passionate about the collaboration market, and he has shown he is willing to buy his way to success if he can’t create it internally. On some level, this deal was no surprise to me. Prior to starting Tact.ai, I led the product team that brought Chatter – Salesforce’s messaging and collaboration app – to market back in 2009. This is Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date. The rumors were true: Salesforce is buying Slack, the popular messaging app beloved by many software development teams and startups, for $27.7 billion.

Salesforce sell slack