What The Data Says About Salesforce and Messaging (Slack + MS Teams)

CRMs and messaging tools are a match made in heaven. Right? They must be if recent news is any indication.

So now the $28 billion acquisition of Slack by Salesforce has left many wondering…what’s next?

And it’s not just Salesforce people are questioning. Microsoft invested $250 million in growing sales and partner support for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Not to mention the company’s significant bets on Microsoft Teams as a messaging and collaboration platform. In fact, during an earnings call in October 2020, CEO Satya Nadella talked about the way that the 115M Microsoft Teams users were creating a platform effect and driving usage for Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM, a Salesforce competitor.

Troops conducted a recent survey to assess the state of CRM and messaging across markets. We fielded the survey in January 2021, and received nearly 200 responses representing different GTM functions and levels, company sizes, and tech stacks.

This data on how CRMs and messaging tools are coming together to bring Customer 360 has been taken from our full survey, which you can view here.

Integration is Still Early Innings

We found that less than half of all organizations surveyed have integrated their CRM and Messaging platform in any way with Salesforce customers integrated 52% of the time.

For Salesforce customers, account-based channels have already surpassed Salesforce Chatter revealing that real-time messaging is the new place for customer 360 and account based collaboration.

Amongst survey respondents, 37% of companies are using more than one messaging system which means inherent silos companies will need to battle with. I’m sure Salesforce admins are cringing right now just imagining the lost information in these multiple messaging systems.

Given these complexities, it’s not surprising that 82% of native CRM integration users are also relying upon additional 3rd party solutions to achieve additional integration capabilities.

Whose building out and managing these integrations and automations?

GTM operations teams handle 63% of integration management, mostly relying on third-party tools.

And, 33% of integrations and automations are built and managed by people outside of ops and IT such as frontline managers.

The Future is Codeless

Coding is hard.

Pointing and clicking is easy. Which is why we’re seeing an increasing number of cases where people outside of IT and even sales operations start to build personal automations, as organizations look to push the limits of efficiency and data at your fingertips.

Systems and integrations need to be built not for those reading this (Hi Salesforce admins!) but for the people who make Salesforce admins mad when they go in and make changes that, today, mess everything up.

Tomorrow they’ll be empowered to make (informed) decisions to integrate new tools and systems with just a single click.

We promise this doesn’t mean your job is in jeopardy!

What’s This Mean?

From integrating platforms to getting the most out of each system, it’s clear that messaging and CRM have a clear future together.

But, what does the data tell us?

First, it’s that organizations will only achieve Customer 360 if they integrate their CRM with their communication channels. Organizations are just getting started here and Troops is excited to play a role in their journey.

Second, integration strategies need to accommodate multiple systems AND instances. As a Salesforce admin, the job shifts from actually manually building the plumbing to more of a strategic role to make it all fit together.

Finally, it means that you need to read the rest of our report to get the details of how CRMs are combining forces with messaging platforms.