What Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack means for innovation in workforce enablement.
In November, Salesforce bought the popular communication platform Slack to create a unified platform for its employees. Even though this was the largest acquisition in Salesforce’s 21-year history at $27.7B, this purchase was no surprise for the world of innovation.
The customer relationship management (CRM) platform acquired multiple companies in recent years to grow their self-service business intelligence, powered by organizations like Tableau and Mulesoft. Increasing the adoption of self-service business intelligence is a huge opportunity to drive the data-centric mentality across multiple departments. Many companies are still in the early stages of this journey. Gartner reports that 87 percent of corporations still have a low business intelligence and analytics maturity level.
Still, bringing in new tech is not enough to create company-wide adoption. Businesses need to examine long-term skills development and craft competitive attraction and retention strategies, and develop a scalable workforce to build economic resiliency.
Access to knowledge empowers dormant innovation potential.
At RIDG, we believe everyone is an innovator. That means we all have lingering innovation potential that can lead to scalable ideas and profitable growth. What stands in the way of uncovering that potential is knowledge.
We don’t know what we don’t know. The more we know, the more confident we feel in innovating and implementing ideas that work. The strategy behind Salesforce’s business intelligence acquisitions empowered its workforce with access to learning more about its clients and their industries, leading them to become experts in the space.
This not only enables skills that are critical in each role but also builds confidence in their workforce.
Make it easy to communicate that knowledge.
What this acquisition teaches us is that acquiring tech and data-driven knowledge is not enough to instill adoption across a company.
You need to create opportunities for knowledge-share to happen quickly. In today’s work environment, we can no longer bounce ideas off one another in person, limiting the opportunity for impromptu innovation and the trust that comes with building a culture in which ideas and knowledge can be shared freely.
With Slack, employees get instant chat messages instantly from their desktops or phone instead of a full email inbox. This means ideas can be shared on the go and impromptu conversations are more likely to happen. This allows people to share their skills and grow knowledge even further.
Future skills building transforms teams.
Salesforce seems to be setting up their teams with the knowledge they need to build confidence and eventually implement that in their ability to scale business, leading to company-wide revenue growth.
RIDG’s BI+LD methodology focuses on real-time scalable skill-building, designed to increase the adoption of a newly refined business model. This has proven to create unstoppable growth and momentum, transforming teams into opportunity-seeking machines and increasing revenue by the millions.
Learn more about RIDG’s customized innovation process, which guarantees scalable product or service design and continuously identifies increased revenue opportunities. From the customer experience journey to inspiring new ways to package everything you already have, we can help you team unlock new business value.
