B2B Marketing Stacks: 6 Reasons Slack is Conquering Collaboration at Work

Technology is always advancing. So when businesses chose new tech to add to their growth marketing stack, they're gambling it'll be useful long enough to make learning it and buying it worthwhile.

In our quest to innovate, we need a B2B martech stack that doesn't get old too quickly, and that works well with the other solutions we use already. We want tools that play nice and stack neatly.

An article in yesterday’s Financial Times did a good job calling out why Slack is the fasting growing business application to work its way into the B2B marketing technology stack and it inspired me to crank out these riffs on why it anchors some many a marketing stack in 2019:

1. Investors value Slack at $5.1B (up from $3.8B in April 2016). That buys a full-time army of the world's top engineers, who are in high demand these days.
2. 9M people and 50K companies are paying to use Slack's virtual collaborative workspace. That scale of adoption means Slack's product road map is informed by utilization patterns. They can build to suit.
3. Messaging has replaced email for personal communications because it's easier, and ease of use drives adoption. Slack is enterprise class Messaging for desktop and mobile. Plus, it's searchable and interoperable (plays nice).
4. Messaging in Channels (smaller sub-chats focused on specific topics) naturally focuses conversations around business objectives, accomodates place- and time-shifting and preserves organizational intelligence for newcomers.
5. They've also attracted an army of 3rd party developers who've built more than 1000 apps. 200 of them are in use at companies that pay to be on Slack, giving way to a common user interface for accessing top CRM, project management and accounting solutions via desktop and mobile, which is big.
6. They're using artificial intelligence to tackle message overload. Slack recruited a 19-person big data engineering team from companies like Facebook, Google and Linkedin to develop their new Work Graph, a dashboard that'll use AI to filter the troves of data collected about how work gets done and help companies better understand and improve business processes.

Slack is becoming the common interface for popping in and out of an increasingly disparate stack of applications without having to cut and paste from screen to screen. If you haven't looked at how Slack can help you increase revenue per employee, now's the time.