Gray MacKenzie from Guava Box and DO Inbound walks through how his team uses Slack to organize communication and streamline marketing workflows. He covers channel setup, team organization, and practical tips for keeping a marketing team connected and efficient.
Hello and welcome back to episode number nine of Agency Toolbox. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie. I'm pretty excited to be talking to you today about Slack, the tool that we use for the vast majority of our communication at Guava Box and at DO Inbound. So I want to show you guys the tool, tell you a little about the tool and how we have it set up specifically. So my goal is to share with you guys how the inbound marketing team that we have gets the most out of Slack. How do we use it to speed us up instead of slow us down? So I want to pull you guys into my Slack application right now. And here we go. Right now I'm inside my Guava Box Slack client and I am in my direct message stream with the Slack bot. So the Slack bot is. I'm not even going to get into that right now. What you can do, I really don't use it that frequently. But Slack is a team chat communication platform. So really what we use it for is to take all the conversations that used to happen either inside email or inside Google Chat or inside the Skype chat or inside text message or phone calls or team meetings and try and get a lot of that stuff documented, but also just speed up the communication. For me personally, I found that I have a relatively slow response time to email and if there's just a quick Slack message, the barrier to go respond to that seems much lower. And so I have a much quicker response time inside Slack than inside of email. The other thing is we're able to kind of keep our email clean and keep that reserved more for some client communication and sales communication, that kind of thing. And we're also able to document a lot of the conversations that we have for the rest of the team to see. So it's not just one to one, what are Andrew and I talking about? And then Ben or Ryan or Tristan or Jamie or someone else on the team can't see what's going on in that conversation that may be related to something that may be context that they need at some point in the client lifecycle. So here is the inside of Slack. I'm signed into my Guava Box team. I have the team members who I chat with most frequently start up here. I've got the different channels that we have set up. And so the channels that we have, we've got clients. This is where anything that's client related, generally client related, that's going to go into that channel. Now if we've got a client who we're working heavily with we have some clients who we've even opened up our own Slack channels with. But we also sometimes will just use a private group or a separate channel for depending on who needs to be involved in that. General is just kind of. That's kind of the random what's happening with the business. That's a channel that's open and everybody on the team sees what happens in there. HubSpot cos we do a ton of HubSpot cos work, so this is HubSpot cos resources. Projects that we're playing with. Continue to hone our skills and work on new things. Marketing. Anything on the marketing side happens in here. Pittsburgh Office is kind of like a private group chat, but it's open for everyone to see what's happening with the office members. Anything that just needs to happen in there. Productivity. These are resources that we find to speed us up. Random this is generally just funny stuff. Sales, what's going on and then web chat. This is something we're gonna get into next time in episode number 10 of Agency Toolbox, where I'm gonna show you how we've set up a tool called Support Kit with Slack to get free live chat on our website where we can respond directly from the platform that we're already in all day, every day, right inside of Slack. So I want to share with you the channels and what the back end of this looks like in case you're not using Slack or if you are, you can see what channels we currently have going on and maybe you've got ideas for how to improve that or this will help you improve your process. There's a lot of features that I could share with you guys, but really that's kind of what I wanted to share right now, is just that's how we structure our communication and it's really. It's not a big secret to how to take a lot of this stuff out of email and become a little bit more of a written culture, making a lot of the conversations that you're having transparent to the whole team. And so this has really transformed the way that we work by using Slack now we used to use hipchat and if you're looking for team chat alternatives, that's going to be the other big one that you're going to see. There's a lot of other tools out there on Inbound Agency Journey. On that podcast, we've interviewed a lot of folks who said, hey, we made the switch to Slack and love it. But we've also interviewed some folks who are using Hipchat folks are using Yammer, which is kind of an older social networking tool. There's a lot of other tools out there. The integrations that Slack has are absolutely outstanding. The pricing right now this is a free account, but you can upgrade and I think it costs like 6 to $7 per user depending on the level that you're trying to upgrade to. That gets you more of your messages remembered. So I think the free version only will let you store the latest 10,000 messages, which is. That's plenty for us for right now, but. But you can upgrade and grab some additional features as well. All right, well, I'm going to keep this one relatively short and sweet, so we're going to stop there. Any ideas for how to improve Slack or questions you have about how we use it, send those to me@graydoinbound.com and I'll see you back here next time in episode 10 of Agency Toolbox to talk about how to set up support kit with Slack so you can have free live chat on your website.
