In the soft world of software, the mega acquisition of Slack by Salesforce is one of the biggest in the world between IBM buy of RedHat for $34 billion and Microsoft merge with LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion. In comparison, Facebook “only” paid $22 Billion WhatsApp. SalesForce must have large pockets as they were already in the top 5 when then bought Tableau for $15.7 Billion.
Tell me why
So, why SalesForce CRM champion has bought the Slack communication tool? Here are my explanations:
- To me, this is clearly a SalesForce response to Microsoft Teams and to a lesser extent Zoom raising popularity, boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the usage of those tools by an army of remote workers
- Although Facebook has not yet found a way to monetize their acquisition of WhatsApp, the acquisition of Slack is certainely as well a defensive move from Salesforce
- I also see here an possible move of how sales are managed using more and more communication collaborative tools.
- A CRM is usually organized around a database. With Slack, the data exchanged with customers will probably be less structured but also richer. A customer could ask open questions on a product in a public manner on Slack and Salesforce + Slack agent could answer to it in an appropriate manner.
Photo credit
Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash
Source
Salesforce buys Slack in a $27.7B megadeal, TechCrunch, December 1, 2020