Why Does Salesforce Believe Slack Is Worth $27.7B?

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) and SaaS tool used by 150k+ companies around the world whereas Slack is a young firm focused on building the optimal collaboration and communications platform for businesses. Recently Salesforce has confirmed that it intends to buy Slack for an eye-watering $27.7B making it the largest acquisition by Salesforce to date. So what do they see in Slack that many other equally-large tech titans don’t see?

1. Data

Slack has over 12 million daily active users with over 200k+ paid customers using Slack Connect, a feature that allows Slack users to connect with up to 20 different organisations (e.g. partners, vendors or customers). This means Slack has copious amounts of data from channels and conversations which Salesforce can mine to its heart content.

2. Ecosystem

Salesforce currently has a tool called Salesforce Customer 360 which helps firms build a single view of the customer and therefore better understand how to tailor their services and provide the best customer experience. The aim is to place Slack’s clean and intuitive user interface on top of this suite of services and essentially connect everything together. This will result in a powerful cloud-based messaging and CRM platform that can comfortably compete with Microsoft’s Teams, which let’s face it, can be unintegrated and inefficient with CPU usage at times.

3. Future of Work

The pandemic has opened our eyes to the idea that most jobs can be done from home which saves both employees and employers time and money. As we move into an “all-digital, work-from-anywhere world” (Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff), it is clear that software will play an even more critical role in the performance of an organisation. Therefore, it seems like a timed strategic move to build a revolutionary platform that is likely to be adopted by a lot of firms around the world.