Editorial
San Francisco-based Slack offers an army of bots that pop up randomly on the enterprise collaboration tool. The bots are robotic members of Slack team chat groups that interact with humans.
Slack's own Slackbot greets and interacts with users. Last week we explained how Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Looker just introduced a business intelligence bot for Slack.
Now Treviso, Italy-based mobile CRM and sales tracking app Sellf joins the Slack App Directory with its own bot, which is designed to help sales agents celebrate sales victories.
Last December Slack kicked up its bot strategy with a development framework, an app store and $80 million in funding for startups to build software that integrates on its platform. Since then, the Slack App Directory has expanded from 160 apps to 280, a Slack representative told CMSWire.
Bringing CRM to Slack
Diego Pizzocaro, CEO and co-founder of Sellf, said his company's app is the "first fully-featured CRM and sales tracking app" for Slack.
Of course, there are plenty of other CRM-related integrations with Slack, such as HubSpot and Zoho, and at least two available in the app store alongside Sellf. A search of "CRM" in the directory produced the Sellf, Zapier andScalus apps.
"Other CRMs like HubSpot or Zoho are integrated with Slack only via Zapier which is a third-party service," Pizzocaro said.
Others, he said, integrate with Slack but have not been reviewed by Slack and therefore are not available via their Slack App Directory.
"In addition they do not allow the same filtering that we allow when the Sellf bot posts messages to Slack," Pizzocaro said. "Not being overloaded with messages for everything happening outside is really important to us in order to avoid 'death by notifications.' We therefore focus exclusively on posting deals won successfully and in addition we allow you to decide from which area of your company you want to receive notifications on the closing deal."
Motivated Sales Agents
The Sellf-Slack integration allows sales agents that close deals to share with the company and celebrate.
"We have a vision of motivating each person in the company to sell more," Pizzocaro told CMSWire. "It can be motivational and help keep sight of your sales target."
The two-year-old Italian tech startup, named last year by Apple as best new business app worldwide, features in its Slack integration a “Sellf BOT,” that monitors activity on Slack. The bot will post messages in Slack for the team to celebrate sales achievements.
“We see a huge potential in motivating employees to reach sales goals," Pizzocaro said. "Sharing sales goals with others and the progress towards them — via our Slack integration — will improve the chances for each member of the team to do better and at the end better contribute to the company's success and benefit their individual careers and success."
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Sellf also today introduces the Business version of its app. The business app aims to help sales managers and business owners achieve their sales goals by boosting productivity of their entire team. Insights include calls and customer visits made by team members.
100 Percent Mobile
Some Sellf features include:
- Mobile app with no laptop required. Fully featured web app version accessible from any web browser
- Synchronization with calendars and Evernote accounts, which allows importing contacts from address books, logs calls and customer visits. Documents can be attached from Dropbox and Google Drive.
Sellf plans to extend the capabilities of the Sellf BOT. By being officially accepted in the Slack App Directory, it can be much more, Pizzocaro said.
"You will be able to interact with it as you do with one of the members of your team," Pizzocaro said. "For example: asking it to remind you of a task or to check the progress toward reaching their sales goals of your colleagues comparing your own progress to theirs. We’re starting to work on it and are keeping a close eye on the feedback of our users who will be starting to use this integration in the following weeks."
Sellf was founded in 2013 has more than 80,000 users worldwide, according to company officials.
Meanwhile, Slack's seen one of the most impressive runs of a tech startup. It was founded in 2009. Slack has been valued at $2.8 billion. It includes about 700,000 paid accounts and 2.3 million users, according to DMR.
Title image "Slack" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gustavo da Cunha Pimenta
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