Empower your team to close the sale for teams

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hi everyone my name is danny hertzberg i'm the senior director of mid-market and smb sales here at slack i'm really excited to be here today talk to you about slack connect and interview one of the world's best sales leaders about how her team uses it too so high level here's what we plan to cover during today's session we'll walk through the specific challenges that sales teams face when connecting with prospects and customers we'll illustrate what slack connect is and how it drives value for sales teams and we'll hear from the woman leading all of revenue across america's at stripe and learn how stripes sales team uses slack connect with over 70 of their customers all right let's get started so ever since march the big question on my mind and nearly every sales leader's mind is this how can we forge the same depth of relationships with our prospects and customers as we used to back when we got to meet them face-to-face in the past we would fly to a customer's headquarters we'd meet them in person and we would learn so much about the company just by walking the halls meeting folks before and after meetings having that small talk and perhaps taking them out for a meal today what we want to show you is how slack connect can help forge that same level of depth in a new approach to selling your product so first let's paint the contrast in a world without slack email is the dominant force in customer communications followed by virtual meetings and the thing is there's some serious shortcomings to both of these email is a black box it can be overly formal it puts people's people in siloed threads and it's hard for new people to catch up and figure out what's going on and meanwhile video conferencing provides a virtual replacement technically speaking for face-to-face sales but when they're over the conversation ends abruptly and everyone disappears back into their day jobs what's more customer experience takes a hit because interactions are infrequent and very formal some of the most important interactions happen before and after that meeting and it's almost impossible to recreate that over email or through a video conference lastly email makes it hard to close customer feedback loops and route feedback to the right people if you ever sent an email to someone waited for their reply found out they're not the right person added another person in et cetera et cetera exactly so the question is how can slack connect help solve these issues let's dig into that slack connect allows you to securely communicate with your customers to build stronger relationships and expedite sales cycles most people here today are familiar with slack as an internal communications tool you communicate with your colleagues and slack channels rather than emails right now you can securely do the same with folks who don't work within your company so what does that look like here at slack within slack the sales and customer success teams use dedicated channels to communicate both internally and externally about an account and we share external channels with our prospects and customers we use these naming conventions that you'll be able to see here to denote whether we're using that channel internally and externally for clarity internal only channels are used by account teams to join folks forces on an account they bring together account executives customer success managers solutions engineers leadership perhaps cross-functional stakeholders anyone who's involved in driving that sale forward external channels include the entire group i just mentioned plus the buyers themselves the prospects and we clearly denote the prospect's profile with their company logo in there and we give ourselves a chance to interact with more speed more depth less formality so how does slack connect impact the way we sell here well our sales reps can send over proposals directly to the customer and get a real-time response what you're seeing here is a real example from one of the sales reps on my team that we anonymized and so in this example zoe sent the proposal to our customer mat he was able to read it over quickly and respond instantly not only that but he shared personal details about his new office in there and what you're witnessing in this slide is the bond solidifying right in the channel as a leader i'm also getting a much better sense of the forecastability of this deal based on the speed of the response time and some of those personal details that matt's sharing here's another example of what rapport looks like once you've truly built some trust we've had customers send photos of their nurseries in the making karaoke contests home renovations you name it you get to know one another's human side very quickly and naturally through slot connect finally responding quickly to a customer is crucial to maintain that trust you feel routing feedback to the right team is easy there's no more forwarding emails looping them in forcing them to try to piece together the conversation instead you take direct customer feedback and you send it along to the product team to review so these are just a small handful of ways i've seen our sales team use slack connect to execute deals faster and build closer relationships with our customers and now i'm excited to welcome one of slack's very own customers stripe here to our session to talk about how slack connect is used in sales at stripe first a bit of context stripe has been one of our earliest adopters of this feature and uses channels throughout the sales cycle so i'm very excited to talk with gene dewitt grosser who is head of america's revenue and growth at stripe welcome gene thanks for having me danny let's kick it off um to kick off can you tell us a little bit more about stripe and your role at the company sure um so stripe provides online payments and more broadly uh economic infrastructure for the internet um our mission is to increase the gdp of the internet so really help enable online commerce my guess is knowing a decent amount about slack that there's a fair amount of overlap between some of your customers and prospective uh customers and ours so probably quite a few stripe users in the audience actually uh at stripe i run revenue and growth for the americas so that's basically end-to-end customer life cycle so we have teams that are doing outbound prospecting account executives that are working with customers or prospects that haven't yet picked stripe and partnering with solutions architects deployment functions account management and then these days we actually have quite a few products beyond payments and so product specialists that will also focus on those and then lastly while stripes certainly got its start uh with startups these days we sell to all sorts of customers and so have teams that focus on your earliest stage startups all the way through fortune 1000 companies globally great thank you jean didn't mention this but she was a very early employee at stripe and um and has seen the company grow and mature quite a bit as her org has also grown and matured so what i'm curious to ask you gene is as a sales leader what are some of your top priorities today yeah i mean we are uh fortunately continuing to scale really rapidly and so there are a couple things we're really focused on the first is on the enterprise side of things what uh folks probably don't know as well as you you may about stripes orientation around developers and startups is actually these days a huge percentage of our revenue comes from enterprise and so we spent the last few years really focusing as a sales organization um on our approach to acquiring and working with the enterprise market um the second area we're also focused on is you know when i started we really were just selling payments and now i think stripe has seven depending on how you want to count them different product lines uh from connect for marketplaces to stripe billing for sas companies like slack and so we're really working on how do we adjust our go to market motion and our sales organization to be multi-product oriented um and then lastly and i think this will dovetail well with the conversation today but we're really trying to figure out how to craft what we call the striped sales way we want it to feel fundamentally different to be sold to by stripe and are figuring out how to make that happen let's dig into that part so how has your team been able to flex and build meaningful relationships with your customers as you create that new approach to selling yeah so one of the things that i think has been kind of unique about stripe is from the early days john and patrick our co-founders were known for really being on the front lines with customers they answered support tickets until i think we had hundreds of employees they were also known for being our implementers and so they would literally show up you know at some startups garage and sit down and you know write code next to them to get them live on stripe so it's been really important to the two of them that we keep a very human element um in our sales process and so one of the things you know we've done as we've thought about how do we really bring our products to life is how do we build meaningfully different relationships and so certainly we can talk about how slack is enabling that and then we also think pretty in-depth about we're an api we're a technology company at the end of the day so how do you really make the technology shine for engineers of these companies that's great let's let's double down on the building meaningful relationships part um how did the sales team at stripe get started with slack connect and how does it play a role in that so we were a user of i think they were called shared channels before sort of the precursor to slack connect so it's really been a part of our sales process since i arrived at stripe and and part of that stems from the fact that our initial audience was really selling to startups and developers and so there was just a ton of pull from our customers to say we'd prefer to be in slack you know than over email with you and over time we figured out that it really does deepen relationships and shorten sales cycles by utilizing slack you just get into a much more real-time communication motion um so you know on the one hand we've historically i think a lot of folks in sales have known that the the kind of gold standard of a deep relationship is you get the person on text right so that you can check in with them after meeting and really get a sense for what happened um and so now we say kind of the gold standards we get them into a shared slack channel um and similarly another kind of you know key concept in sales is is what we call the law of 2x where you'll have a meeting on monday you have you know follow-up action items with the the customer or the prospect and there's a tendency for the salesperson to then schedule the next meeting the following monday when frankly it probably could have happened the next day and accelerated decision making and so we find that by having the shared slack channels that that iteration that dialogue happens in real time rather than you know the next time you can get calendar schedules to align that's great uh can you paint the picture for us so so what does it look like when you use slack connect with your customers throughout the deal cycle yeah so we really use it everywhere we use it from a pre-sales perspective where we'll have our account executives as well as our solution architects on our side in a channel that's shared with the customer and you'll have their developers you'll have their head of payments you'll have folks from their finance department um and so often you know were well you know you might have a formal meeting where you're presenting an overview doing a demo and then have a bunch of follow-up on more information they were going to provide us things we can clarify and so we'll go back and forth in afterwards we also really heavily use it during the integration phase so once you sign a deal and now the company is actually writing code to go live with stripe they have a ton of questions um and so this lets them get unblocked immediately versus again sort of having to wait to compile everything for a weekly um meeting and then we also use it similar to how you showed in in your presentation for existing customers where we'll sometimes have multiple slack channels per customer to align different teams but again use that for everything from reviewing metrics on a weekly basis to working through integration challenges as folks continue to scale super helpful thank you so you're using it across all phases of the sales cycle i'm curious you know just contrast the difference for us what's the difference between using slack versus other communications like text as you said the former gold standard or email that sales teams used to rely on yeah i think it just it's more in line with the cadence of the business these days um so one of the things that we talk a lot about with our customers is we believe that moving to stripe helps them be more adaptive right to be able to move more quickly and communications are a big part of moving more quickly as well um so with email often things are like like you mentioned sort of sitting in an inbox waiting for the right people to get on thread not clear exactly who's meant to respond because you've got 20 people on the two line et cetera um so we feel like it really just lets both sides work in real time what does it look like to use slack versus other communication methods like you mentioned text earlier as the past gold standard or email that sales teams used to rely on yeah so i think the big difference is that it really lets you interact in real time so that people remain unblocked so for email you know as you mentioned often those messages are gonna sit in your inbox you've got a bunch of people on the two lines it's not obvious who's in charge of responding and here instead as things come up throughout the day folks can engage perfect and can you illustrate some specific examples that the stripe sales team has used to close a deal within slack yeah probably one of the best examples um is actually with one of our largest partners um an e-commerce platform that i think a lot of you probably would be familiar with so this is our most robust use of slack by far i think we have five different slack channels with them um some of them are very topical for meaty things that come up and then some are broader and with them we actually have a full shared norms doc where we've gone through on both sides to articulate what are you know slas on both sides what are things that belong in the slack channel versus need to go through say a formal ticketing process as an example um and then all the standing topics and obviously link out to your running agendas for meetings etc um so that's actually been a sort of our internal gold standard for how you set things up and had a great example actually last week where we're trying to launch a new payment method in japan with them and we're working out a couple kinks right before go live that started on email and after two back and forth we flipped it over into slack and you know within five minutes we'd actually figured out the issue i love that example five channels with one customer is pretty impressive and speaks highly of you know how in depth you go with your customers so thank you for that i'm curious about the post sale part too you know once you've closed the deal how do you hand it over to the next phase of implementation across the teams you lead yeah so um you know often there's some people that were in the pre-sales process that aren't going to carry across into the post-sale um so one of the things we do is when we once we've closed a deal we'll do a scoping session for integration and during that meeting we pull in our integration engineers and our implementation consultants and then your developers your product managers and other key folks at the customer to figure out how we're going to spend the next you know weeks and months deploying stripe and from there we then typically initiate with that group a slack channel where again we'll have you know links um to the integration guide that we've built out together links to the meeting notes and sort of like i said we'll often have meetings to review some things in a lot of depth but then all of the active follow-up happens in channel afterwards included including often sharing code so keeps us going throughout the course of the week thank you for that um okay let's end before q a on this final question what are you excited about as stripe reinvents the selling process i'm excited about exactly that so one of the things i always tell my team is you know if you wanted to work in sales in the technology sector and you were have asked you know in the 70s and 80s who is the best at this people probably would have answered ibm if you asked that question again in the 90s folks would have said oracle if you asked that question again in the thousands they would have said salesforce and i really don't believe that anybody has become the leader in how to sell in this era that's much more online oriented customers are self-educating and you also have much more of platform oriented products where it's much more bespoke and specific to the company ultimately what you buy and how you use things so we're very excited about trying to figure out how you craft this striped sales way to really sell in this much more dynamic and customized environment um and are early on our journey but i think figuring out a couple good things i feel that excitement it's infectious and i think that's inspiring for everyone listening you know the playbook is yet to be built and you know and we all have a chance to pioneer it so thank you so much gene for sharing exactly how you guys use slack connect and what you're doing to innovate right now we feel really lucky to have you as a customer and and sharing your wisdom about sock connect for sales thanks for having me