Salesforce Acquire Troops – Slack to Salesforce Integration

Today, Troops announced they have signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Salesforce. Troops describe themselves as a “Slack bot for sales teams”, but to break it down further, Troops allows you to easily integrate Slack and Salesforce.

This may come as a surprise for some, maybe even a bit baffling, but dive deeper and the reasons become more obvious…

What Is Troops?

Troops was founded back in 2016, as a Slack bot for sales teams – essentially letting you send and receive data from Salesforce using the Slack interface.

Back in 2016, Slack was relatively unknown, with corporate messaging tools yet to reach the mass market (Microsoft Teams was launched in 2017). So you can safely say that Troops had a clear vision for the future, which Salesforce only realized at the end of 2020 when they acquired Slack.

Troops has the kind of features you would expect from a Salesforce to Slack integration tool. Once you’ve installed the AppExchange App, you can codelessly configure the tool in the following ways:

• Create Deal Rooms: Create Slack channels for your most important deals, bring together all team members, and share key moments on the Opp, as well as meeting notes.
• Signals: Build out a notification system that notifies the right people when something relevant changes in Salesforce.
• Approvals: Get approvals done faster by sending them directly into Slack.

We were lucky enough to have Scott Britton, Co-Founder of Troops, write an article for us earlier this year. Check it out to learn more about the benefits of codelessly integrating Salesforce and Slack…

The Future of Salesforce and Slack

Troops hit the nail on the head when they saw the future of “getting things done”, not using fields or forms, but with conversations with human beings.

Since Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of 2020, and it’s been clear that over time these tools will be tightly integrated to reimagine the future of work as the new Digital HQ. But exactly how Salesforce will accomplish this, hasn’t been clear until a couple of weeks ago.

TrailblazerDX focused heavily on Slack. The announcement of Salesforce Flow being extended to work with Slack is huge, alongside the new Apex SDK, to take integration to a whole new level.

Salesforce also announced three new apps:

• Sales Cloud for Slack (Beta)
• Service Cloud for Slack (Beta)
• Marketing Cloud for Slack (Beta)

These apps are intended to cater for common Slack to Salesforce integration use cases. Will Troops be rebranded to “Sales Cloud for Slack”? Or will Troops technology form the foundation for all Slack apps?

What is clear is that Troops was one of the founding companies for Slack to Salesforce integration technology. The talent and knowledge within the company will be a valuable asset for Salesforce as they push further to combine the two platforms into one.

Summary

The future of Slack is exciting. Current integration options using the Slack for Salesforce App aren’t impactful, but it’s clear that Salesforce is committed to reimagining its platform.

The one question on my mind… What will happen with Troops’ Microsoft Teams to Salesforce Integration?!