Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Slack Technologies in December 2020, and the deal closed in July 2021 at a value of roughly twenty-eight billion dollars, the largest acquisition in Salesforce's history at the time. For a company whose entire business is customer relationship software, buying a workplace messaging platform was, on its face, an unusual move. The logic behind it says a lot about where CRM software was heading.
What Actually Happened
Slack had spent the previous several years becoming the default place many companies communicated internally, replacing much of what used to happen over email. Salesforce's argument for the acquisition was that customer relationship data was still trapped in dashboards and reports that sales, support, and marketing teams had to actively go check, while the actual conversations about that data, who was following up with which account, what a customer had just said, were happening somewhere else entirely, inside chat. Folding Slack into Salesforce's Customer 360 platform was a bet that the two needed to live in the same place.
The integration that followed was not immediate. Salesforce spent the next two years building what it began calling a "Slack-first" strategy, routing CRM alerts, approvals, and account updates directly into Slack channels rather than requiring a separate login to the CRM itself. By making Slack the interface layer sitting on top of the CRM, rather than a separate tool next to it, Salesforce was also positioning itself more directly against Microsoft, which was bundling Teams into its own enterprise software at no extra cost.
Why We're Featuring It
CRM and customer relations infrastructure is one of the specialized fields ADAB works in directly, described in more detail on our Technology page. The Salesforce and Slack deal is a useful case study in a pattern that shows up constantly in that work: the software a team actually uses every day and the system of record holding the data about a customer are often two different tools, and the friction between them is where a lot of real customer relationships quietly fall through the cracks. Whether the fix is a billion-dollar acquisition or a much smaller integration between two existing systems, the underlying problem it solves is the same one.