Salesforce gave Sales Cloud users an early preview of CRM features planned for release throughout 2022, including new details on Slack integrations, revenue intelligence subscription management and sales enablement.

Many sales teams still work remotely; prior to the pandemic, sales was typically a team sport played in close office quarters.

The key features:

help both sales reps and their managers stay connected across disparate locations,

taken together,

Combining Slack and Salesforce Sales Cloud helps bridge the distance between sales team colleagues and managers, said Forrester Research analyst Kate Leggett. It also helps address the reality that large sales deals require increasingly more collaboration between sales teams and the customer’s buying team.

Respondents said the average number of interactions between selling and buying teams increased from 17 in 2019 to 27 in 2021. Deals are taking longer to close, too. In 2015, 19% of deals took four months or longer; that number rose to 32% in 2021.