Discover Salesforce Channels Inside Slack | Dreamforce 2025

You.

Take you on a journey with us today. So we're going to talk all about Salesforce channels. Why they're important, how they work. We're going to show you the pieces to put together to go implement this yourselves. We're going to show you how this relates to Salesforce and Slack. Of course, we're going to talk security and permissions and we're going to get to the good stuff. At the end, we're going to demo some things for you.

Awesome. So by the end of the presentation, we are hoping that Salesforce channels will change your perspective on how you use Slack.

We've been waiting, I would say probably about three years for this to see the unification of Salesforce and Slack. It's very exciting for us. And I want you to just think through the lens of how many tabs you have open at any given time, how many systems you're popping in and out of this journey that we're gonna take you on. Think about the last time you were talking about a deal in a Slack channel. You were talking about a campaign. Maybe you were swarming a case and somebody went and said, hey, where are we gonna update Salesforce? Who's gonna go back and do that? And the vibe just kind of dies in that channel. Right? Cause nobody wants to go switch to another browser tab. They're gonna open another system. We wanna just keep doing the work right and getting things done.

So.

So Salesforce Channels is really meant to close that gap for us. So we think about how Slack is organized around channels. We think about how Salesforce organizes around records. This is really meant to reduce that context switching that kind of slows us down during the day. So think about that as we're going through this journey together.

And I'm like so blown away by this. Is this real? Is this real, Nicole?

This is real. This is literally a dream come true for us and it's gonna be for you as well. And I know what you're thinking, okay, like what's the cost? What's the catch? Because a lot of add on costs potentially. But free is for me. This is free for all free and paid Slack plans and it's listed up there. But this is also free for all standard Salesforce editions. If you're asking yourself, what's a standard Salesforce edition? Cause that's a little bit of a new verbiage for us listed out up there. But this is ready to be enabled today if you have the qualifying items on the screen there.

Awesome. So now we're going to learn about how we can actually use Salesforce channels in Slack. Think about how your salespeople interact with Slack and Salesforce. As of now, they want to focus more on building relationships rather than entering data in 10 different systems. Right? They're having conversations with the team members in Slack, but they're not able to update the data then and there. They have to open a separate tab or maybe like a separate application on their phone to be able to update an opportunity they're having a conversation around. And so wouldn't be amazing if they can do all of that in Salesforce. Sorry, in Slack. So now within Slack, you can actually create and link records to channels. You can not only do that, but like find records, update records, even delete them if you have permissions. But all the permissions are connected to your Salesforce permission. So if you have permission for a Salesforce record in Salesforce, you'll be able to perform all of these actions here. And this is on the Slack side. Now you might be wondering, some of my salespeople are more interested in only using Salesforce, not Slack. What am I supposed to do for them? Well, on the Salesforce side, you will see exactly this entire Slack widget in there with every right record it is associated to. So for example, you have enabled Salesforce Channels for opportunities or any other custom object you're using. You can then add this widget on your Lightning page and then you'll be able to use Slack. From there you can share files, you can react with emojis, you can do so much more. You can collaborate with your team members. Add your team members in this channel from. From Salesforce as well. So it's like a seamless collaboration between Slack and Salesforce. And as I said, you might be wondering which objects have access to this. So all the standard Salesforce objects which are UI API enabled, because not all objects on Salesforce have user interfaces. So all the objects with user interface API can then have their own dedicated Salesforce channels. And any custom object you have created for your Org and can also have a Salesforce channel. It's totally up to you which all channels you want to enable, which all objects you wanna enable. Salesforce channels for. Now, this is interesting information. Why don't we get ourselves on a journey to see how we can connect Salesforce and Stack.

Let's build it. Let's build it together. Oh, or let's skip right over it.

And we just build it.

We're going to click it and then we'll go.

Okay.

All right. So you're going to Start in Slack, you're going to add the target. Org URL. You're going to map users automatically to save yourself time. And then you're going to request the connection for that salesforce. Org. We're going to bop back over to Salesforce and we're going to look for Manage Slack connections and we're going to see the request we just made. We're going to confirm how we map those users. We're definitely going to read every word of the terms and conditions and we're going to approve. We're gonna go back over to Slack. There's the approval we've been waiting for. We're gonna confirm all that information and then we're gonna activate. We have to double activate. Cause we have to be double sure. And that's it. That's your baseline Slack and Salesforce connection. We're gonna go back to Salesforce to start setting up Slack channels for records. So you're gonna choose the objects that you want to have Salesforce channels for. Like Piyusha said, there's a ton. We're just going to do accounts opportunities and cases for our demo to get us started. Once we select the objects, we're going to see a list out of those and the number of record pages for those. We want to add that Slack component to the record layout. So it's going to give us the ability to go right there. I could also skip to the object manager and then I'm going to go to whichever Lightning record page I choose. I'm going to edit that and I'm going to add the Slack component. So it's the standard process that you're used to. If you haven't done this before, you're just going to search for the component and then click and drag over. Now, pro tip here. If you're not ready to make this visible for all your users, you can filter the widget. While that gets figured out, you can filter the widget by profile permissions, that user attribute. You can also create custom Slack details layouts. If you don't want all of the same fields to show in Slack, we'll show that in piyush's demo, you can create a custom layout there. And then once we have our Slack component added, we're going to go back to Slack. We're going to do a couple more things. We're going to show you how to add users manually. So you can do that individually or by a CSV file. If you didn't do that automatically and then you have some customization, you can do for your Salesforce channels. So we'll go into the account one. You can actually choose whether these channels are automatically public, available to everyone, or private. Maybe you have some legal or HR channels. And then you're gonna be able to select the related list tabs that you'd like to see automatically when those channels are created. So we just selected a couple here, but as you can see, there's quite a lot to choose from. And. And then we can also further customize our link unfurl. So when you post a link in a Slack channel, it unfurls. You get to choose how much information shows on that unfurl. Again, that's a security and permission capability for you. So that was about I think three and a half minutes of the backend setup. Now Piyusha's gonna show us an action.

Awesome. And we actually just skipped like one bit here and that's like installing the app bit because we are assuming that you guys would have already installed it for some reason.

No, you're click forward.

Okay, awesome. So Nicole, why don't you take us through the security and access as well. Great point.

We don't want to skip this because we want to make sure things are secure before we go play with it. So I'm not going to read to you from the slide except for this one phrase. So Slack respects Salesforce security. We're thinking about permissions, how people get access to the Salesforce data. You saw in the previous demo that channels could be public or private. That doesn't control access to the Salesforce data. That is controlled through Salesforce permission sets or profile settings. So you might have access to one of these channels, but only the Messages tab. That's because you don't have permission in Salesforce to see or edit that data. You can also potentially be added to one of these channels and have maybe View only access. So the admins on the Salesforce side are gonna have to collaborate with the Slack admins to really architect this to understand who should be able to make what changes and see what information in the Salesforce channels. Pro tip here. If somebody just needs View access, you can get away with setting up an identity user for that person in Salesforce and that gives them view access. And a note here as well. Slack has the concept of guest users, single channel or multi channel. They at this moment in time can't have mapping to Salesforce information. So limitation there. But they'll see the Messages tab and they can still collaborate in that conversation. Okay. Now that we have the security and permission Information Piyush is gonna show us it in action.

Awesome. So we actually are going to look at how we are going to actually see all these things in action. So for example, I'm in the Mickey Mouse account. We have just added the Slack channel here and I'm posting a message which my team can see from here. And on the Slack side as well. I've just said hello channel. I'm going to move on to the Slack side and I'm going to probably show you how it looks like. So I can go to the Slack just by clicking. I can actually, yeah, just click there and go to Slack on the Slack side. As you can see, I have the Mickey Mouse account and it has the account tag up top. So you can actually identify it's not the not any other channel but a Salesforce channel. In here you can see I have all the account access details. I can see who the account manager is, who these details are created by. Last update, all of those details. I can also see all the cases, opportunities and a lot of the related details associated with the channel. So for example, I can see the account team. All the lists are available to me here. I can add more lists here as well, depending on my preferences. For example, I click on Salesforce list and I want to maybe add something fun, maybe say related contacts and that's it. Just with a click of a button I can see all the related contacts here. I can see there are two related contacts with the account, Minnie Mouse and I can add more people in the channel. I can just because this is a private public channel, more people will be able to find it. I if I want to limit the access, I'll probably create a private channel for this one. From this channel itself I can actually add opportunities. So for example, this is one of the opportunities I'm looking at. For now, I'm not adding anything in here. If this opportunity has a separate channel, I can see the conversations here as well. But since this opportunity doesn't have a channel, the conversations looks really nothing. But I just got a bigger opportunity with the Mickey Mouse account. So I'm adding a new opportunity here. I'm adding the opportunity type, the details, all the things from Slack, which then will be added to Salesforce and we are going to look at that in a sec. The opportunity has been added. I can refresh the dashboard. I'll be able to see it here. Now for this opportunity, if I want to create a new channel, I could just click on it and create a new channel to start a conversation with my team. So, for example, I'm creating a new channel. I don't have an existing channel, so I'm going to go ahead and create a new one. And that's it. I have a new private channel for the opportunity. I can add more people, I can drop files, I can do anything I want. But I am going to actually share a file with my team on the Mickey Mouse account. And I'm going to show that to you how it looks like in Salesforce. So I've just uploaded a file, sending it, and now we'll go to the Salesforce side to see how it looks like for us. So on the Salesforce end, the file is already there. I can click on the file, it'll be downloaded for me. I will have access to the file. And if I go back to the opportunities I can see the opportunity which I added on the Slack side is now being reflected here. So this is a seamless connection between Salesforce and Slack. Whatever I'm doing in Slack reflected in Salesforce and whatever I'm doing inside of Salesforce will be then reflected on the Slack side. And it actually is going to save so much time, I feel like. But before we move on, and for some reason we are still struggling. So before we move on, we have some key takeaways for you all. And I feel like these are something really important. And Nicole will take us through those. Yeah.

And I hope you can see too, through that journey now you can access either system without losing context. Right. So you've got your conversations pulled into Salesforce. You've. You got your data in Slack. So it combines this, the two platforms and you're gonna save a ton of time and now everyone's gonna be happy. Cause they can add records from Slack and you can control who can do that. Again, free is for us. Free is for me. Available on all free and paid Slack plans and standard Salesforce editions. And the setup, one video that we took you through that was about three and a half minutes. I didn't cut anything out of that. That's how long it took to connect the the two systems and then set up the basic Salesforce channel setup. And then again, just to emphasize that Slack respects Salesforce permissions. And this is a really awesome opportunity, we think, for Slack admins and Salesforce admins to work together. And we very much appreciate your time.

Awesome. Before we actually move on, Nicole, what do you think gives people the power of feeling, of power?

I don't think it's money or status. I don't think it's status either.

Okay, maybe it's Salesforce channels inside Slack.

I think it is. I think that's what really pumps me out.

Awesome. So if you want to get started on your journey you can actually take a screenshot of the image on your screen. Trailhead is a really amazing resource so you can get started but I would actually recommend the implementation guide. It has all the steps you need to go through the detailed implementation for this, everything you need and the things we talked about in our presentation. And if you are curious and you have any questions you can actually scan the QR code in the middle and you'll be able to join the Slack community workspace which has people like us. All the Slack expert, all the Slack product managers. They will be able to answer your questions. So if you're interested you can join that. And that's it from us. Thank you. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you. Thank you so much.