Slack Connect & The Future Of Business Software

Slack recently announced Slack Connect, a product that allows disparate companies to collaborate inside of a Slack channel. They now have more than 40,000 customers using the product.

For those interested in business software, I think there's reason to believe that products like Slack Connect — software that allows users across different companies to collaborate inside the same instance of that software — will lead to a trend that's even more impactful than the shift to the cloud.

Slack Connect users can have a shared Slack channel with their customers, vendors, partners, and prospects. I haven't used the product yet, but I recently collaborated in real-time with a customer to build a presentation using the same instance of Google Slides. It was so much more efficient. Imagine finance teams collaborating on complex invoicing issues inside the same instance of Netsuite. Or project managers at separate companies collaborating inside of SmartSheet. Or a salesperson collaborating with on a customer's buying process inside the same instance of Salesforce.

Moving core, cross-company business activities into a shared workspace will be enormously valuable to the users inside of each company. And even more impactful is the impact on distribution and go-to-market. Suddenly, Netsuite, SmartSheet and Salesforce have native network effects (e.g. their software is more valuable to each user when more users use it). This is why Slack Connect is so interesting. Slack already had network effects inside of a company, but growth was limited to the size of each individual company. Slack Connect enables unlimited network effects.

Don't get me wrong, like the move to the cloud, there are enormous challenges for software vendors that pursue this strategy. There's a reason I don't collaborate on Google Slides with the majority of customers. Most large companies aren't using Google's applications, and thus users don't have a log-in and aren’t authorized to use their personal one for work purposes. There are significant privacy and adoption challenges that need to be overcome.

Slack has an advantage here in that their core customer base is still startups, small businesses, and tech companies (though they’re rapidly moving upmarket). This core allowed Slack to get Connect into market much more quickly than Microsoft could've with its Teams product.

The irony of Microsoft being behind on this is that they own the one asset that could've accelerated the growth and adoption of cross-company messaging — LinkedIn.

LinkedIn already knows most professionals’ "professional social graph." These social graphs are the underlying infrastructure that enable a network to grow. Consider Whatsapp, who built a nice messaging app and then tapped into your phone's address book (your social graph) to seamlessly build out its network. They went from 0 to a billion users in just a few years. They never could’ve done that if they didn’t have access to people’s personal address book. LinkedIn is the world’s professional address book.

LinkedIn messaging could've been a far better and faster-growing version of Slack Connect. But LinkedIn underinvested in its messaging feature to the point that it's almost unusable. The spam is overwhelming, and the poor user experience makes it impossible to use productively.

This miss isn't really a surprise, and I'm not playing Monday morning quarterback. Microsoft hadn't built its initial software around connecting disparate companies. In fact, it was quite the opposite. And turning the tide isn't easy. Also, LinkedIn's core customers are recruiters and marketers; use cases where the value of cross-company collaboration isn't obvious.

So, all of this is to say that there's an enormous opportunity for emerging SaaS companies to build native cross-company collaboration tools into their code, use cases, and culture from the outset. It's hard to predict that any trend is business software will be as impactful as the shift to the cloud, but if there's one out there, this might be it.

People At Work Podcast

The nice folks at Jostle were kind enough to have me on their People at Work podcast. We discussed a variety of topics around leading teams through hypergrowth. You can listen to the podcast on Apple here or Spotify here.

The Importance Of Customer Discovery In A Crisis

A few weeks ago, I wrote about some best practices on how sales organizations can keep their revenue machines running through the COVID pandemic.

One thing I didn't spend enough time on in that post was the importance of understanding how things have changed for your existing customers. Your customers were living in a different world when they purchased your product. At the time, your product was likely solving a top 3 problem for your buyer. With COVID, things may have changed. Your product might be significantly more valuable now than it was prior to COVID — or significantly less valuable. Either way, you need to find out quickly.

Most companies are going to be cutting expenses, and you must understand whether or not your product is on the shortlist of things to cut. Reversing that reality may require hard pivots, so you need to know now.

Here are some key questions to ask your customers as you have conversations or complete account reviews:

1/ How has COVID impacted you? How has it impacted your customers?

2/ How have your top 3 or 4 priorities changed due to COVID?

3/ What kinds of products are you buying now (if any)? What kinds of products are you cutting?

4/ Are you cutting staff? Will the users that historically have used our product change?

5/ Before COVID hit, our product was addressing a top 3 priority for you. Is that still true?

6/ Is our product more or less important to you than it was prior to COVID? Do you expect to use it more? Less? Why?

7/ Are you using our product differently now than you did prior to COVID? How?

8/ What parts of our product are more useful to you now? Less useful?

Push your customers to give you hard answers to these questions — even if you don’t want to hear them. And make it easy. Send simple surveys. Quickly run through these questions at the beginning or end of calls or Zooms.

Finally, it’s worth noting that commercial teams tend to be extremely optimistic. This project requires intense pessimism and a search for the real truth. This is not the time to sugarcoat what's happening in your market. Get to the truth as quickly as possible. If needed, reset expectations, find ways to repackage your solution around new problems, or (in rare cases) rebuild your solution to solve the emerging problems your customers are facing in this new world.

Selling Through A Crisis

2020 will mark the third economic crisis I've been through in my career — the dot-com crash in 2000, the mortgage crisis in 2008, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

Economic busts are inevitable. And although this one feels a lot different than the first two, in many ways, it also feels the same.

Selling in these kinds of crises can be extremely difficult. Prospects are getting laid off or furloughed. Companies are cutting back on expenses and doing very little new purchasing. Leadership teams are distracted with getting their companies back on track. Getting a prospect's attention can be difficult if not impossible. Finally, the notion of cold calling or pitching your product in this kind of environment can seem trivial or even insensitive.

That said, our companies and our sales team have to get moving again. Standing still is the worst thing for all of us. 

Here are some hopefully practical lessons I've picked up during past economic slowdowns that might be helpful as you sort through how to get your sales numbers back on track. 

Quickly disqualify 10%-20% of your opportunities. This sounds like a counterintuitive thing to do in a downturn, but it's more important than ever. One of the most important things a salesperson can do is to identify opportunities that are a waste of time. With this downturn, a lot of opportunities that might have looked real a month ago are no longer real. Go find them. Segment opportunities that are more or less likely to buy in this environment. Filter by industry or geography or product or whatever attribute might lead to disqualification. Make a list of your active sales opportunities. Put an X next to any opportunity that you suspect isn't actually interested in buying your product in the near future for whatever reason. Within the next week ask each of these prospects directly if they're interested in buying in the short term. If not, no problem, you'll come back later.

Empathy, empathy, empathy. Empathy is always important in sales. It's even more important now. I'd recommend sitting down for a few minutes, closing your eyes and trying to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect. What's on that person's mind? What are their priorities? What are they scared of? How will they view your product in this new world? What's changed in their day-to-day? Before you make another sales call, really try to get inside their mind. You should also talk to your CFO or members of your leadership team or individuals that buy things within your organization. Ask them how they're thinking about new purchases in this environment? What's their frame of mind? Your first task in a crisis is to get inside the context of your buyer. The person you were selling to a couple months ago is likely a very different person now.  

Be 50% more direct. Most buyers are going to be a lot busier than they were a month ago. They'll have less time to talk to salespeople. Respond to that. All of your emails should be less than 100 words. On calls and in meetings, get right to the point. Small talk is fine. You need to be empathetic and understand how the crisis is impacting them, but when you're talking about your deal, get to the point more quickly than you normally would. Focus on movement and when you suspect a lack of interest or a slow down in a deal, call it out. Don't be shy in these times. Ask the hard questions. Be direct.

Position your product as relevant to the crisis (but don't go overboard). Sales of home fitness equipment and computer monitors have exploded over the last couple of weeks while sales of luggage and swimwear have nosedived. The world is different now, and nearly every company is responding. It seems like every company in America has a product to help with the COVID crisis. Some people might find this annoying. I find it inspiring. I love to watch companies fight and scrap to align themselves with the new normal. Find out how your customers are using your product differently in this environment and share that with prospects. But don't embellish. Tell real stories that deliver real value. You know if your product will help in the crisis. And if it does, you should tout that. But be genuine and honest. Spin or inappropriate embellishment in a crisis will backfire.

Help your prospect keep their job. Your buyer likely has some concern about being laid off. Purchasing a new product often creates new value that needs to be implemented and managed. Helping your prospect drive the sale through their own organization can increase the likelihood that they'll stay with their company and, ideally, get promoted. If your prospect sees your product in this light, they'll be a lot more willing to pick up the phone when you call.

Celebrate small wins. Wins can be hard to come by in a downturn. A few months ago, a million-dollar deal may have been cause for celebration. In this environment, a good meeting or even validation that a prospect is still planning to buy your product may be enough to celebrate. Find ways to broadcast these small wins. Do it through Slack, or email, or mention them in a team meeting. Everyone is looking for good news. Share it. Over time these little wins will get bigger and bigger. 

Share learnings with your team. There are no experts on how to sell your product in a pandemic. Create a Slack channel or email list where every rep can enter things they've learned that day or that week. After a few weeks, the whole team will be experts. 

Give your prospects something. With a little bit of extra downtime, now is the time to double down on drip marketing. Send your prospects data, or an article, or a tweet that you know they'll find interesting. Do the work to find interesting things and share them with your prospects without asking for anything at all in return. 

Sharpen your skills. If you do find yourself with some extra downtime, use this time to sharpen your skills. Go back and look at the last few months of sales activity and do some self-analysis. Where are you slowing down? Look at the quality of your sales conversions against your peers — prospect, presentations, proposal generation, negotiating, closing, etc. Find out what you're not doing as well as you could be and focus on improving that. Professional athletes practice way, way, way more than they play games. That's because they have the time. Actual football games happen once a week for three hours. Suddenly you have a lot more time to practice. Do it. 

Don't devalue your product. When demand decreases, sellers quickly use price as a lever to keep up the momentum. Don't do this. Your product delivered some amount of value a year ago, and it will deliver the same or more value when we come out of this downturn. Proactive price concessions devalue your product in the eyes of the buyer and weaken sales reps and teams. Raise the bar and find ways to hold your price steady through the downturn. That said, as I wrote above, do be empathetic. Understand the challenges your prospects are facing and respond to them if you can. If they see the value in your product but legitimately can't afford or can't comply with standard contract terms, hear them out and respond if you can. This isn't about being difficult to work with; it's about pushing yourself to keep the bar high for demonstrating the value of your product.

Perhaps the best advice of all is to stay positive. I know from experience that as bad as it seemed at the time, we came out of the downturns in 2000 and 2008 just fine. This one will be no different. Have empathy for your buyer. Amp up your focus. Celebrate small wins. Most of all, keep grinding. 

Stay safe.

Transforming Value Chains

This piece by Ben Thompson titled, Email Addresses and Razor Blades, might be the best thing I’ve ever read on modern-day business strategy.

I strongly encourage you to read the post and/or listen to the associated podcast if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

The piece highlights Harry’s Razors and their efforts to disrupt the razor blade industry with an online direct-to-consumer (DTC) model.

By selling online directly to the consumer, Harry’s was able to disrupt the razor blade value chain created by giants like Proctor & Gamble and cut out retailers that leveraged their shelf space to take a ~40% margin. By selling online and leveraging highly efficient, targeted advertisements via Google and Facebook, Harry’s could pass a lot of that 40% back to the consumer, dramatically undercutting the incumbents and scooping up lots of market share.

Thompson points out that this margin quickly disappeared via Facebook and Google ad auctions. As DTC companies flooded to these ad channels, the prices went up and up and up, erasing the 40% margin, and bringing the razor blade market back to equilibrium. Now, Harry’s and other DTC companies are pivoting into brick-and-mortar and the FTC is raising anti-competition flags. Nobody wants to compete with P&G, but that might be a lot better than competing with Facebook...

The broader lesson here is that is it so crucial for companies to deeply understand the value chain associated with the product they’re delivering and how that value chain is changing over time. The macro conditions that allow new entrants to earn a seat in the value chain can be the same conditions that take that seat away.

Working For Jeff Bezos

I’m reading Amazon’s Management System by Ram Charan and Julia Yang. I absolutely love this excerpt:

As former Amazon executive John Rossman put it: “If you want to succeed in Jeff’s relentless and fiercely competitive world, you cannot:

• Feel sorry for yourself

• Give away your power

• Shy away from change

• Waste energy on things you cannot control

• Worry about pleasing others

• Fear taking calculated risks

• Dwell on the past

• Make the same mistakes over and over

• Resent others’ success

• Give up after failure

• Feel the world owes you anything; or

• Expect immediate results

The most successful are those who can excel in the pressure cooker, week in and week out, shaking off the occasional failure and the subsequent tongue-lashing, put their heads down, and keep on driving.”

This is a near perfect description of the best people I’ve worked with over the years.

Hiring Your First Head Of Sales

By far, the most frequent question I get from founders is this: How do I go about hiring a Head of Sales? I've literally received this question four times in the last six or seven weeks.

Hiring a Head of Sales at a startup is a very difficult, important, and scary thing for a founder. Making a mistake on this hire can set the company back several quarters. I try to avoid making declarative statements to founders because context is so important and each situation is unique. That said, here are a few things that will help reduce the risk associated with hiring a Head of Sales for the first time:

1/ Ensure the candidate has been an ultra-successful individual contributor. I know, I know, the best salespeople aren’t necessarily the best managers. You don't need the best salesperson in the world, but you do need someone who has done it before. In startup sales, you can't lead the calvary if you can't sit in the saddle. Strong sales capabilities (both to sell direct and to sell salespeople on joining the company) are crucial in this role. If this candidate can't sell, they likely can't recruit. It’s not worth that risk.

2/ Ensure the candidate has sold into (roughly) similar-sized organizations in the past. If you're selling to large enterprises, don't hire an SMB expert, and vice-versa. It's not impossible to make the transition, but it's relatively unlikely that it will be successful. Often, the things that make people good at SMB sales make them bad at enterprise sales. Also, do consider the candidate's experience with the vertical you're selling into. Ideally, you will be able to find someone who has sold into that vertical in the past. I wouldn't make this a requirement in every situation. The importance of this is industry dependent. But if the industry has a steep learning curve, optimize around that set of experience.

3/ If you have the capital, hire a headhunter to help. Doing this search right requires an expertise and time investment that most founders can't afford. This is a good opportunity to outsource.

4/ Hire a “stretch VP.” A stretch VP is a rising star (generally Director level) that needs to level-up a bit to become a sales leader at a larger organization. This type of candidate will generally lean towards execution but will have the potential to recruit and run a team. This is a good hedge. If the candidate levels-up and can run the whole sales organization, that's great. If they can't, it'll be easier to “level” them with a more senior candidate. If you hire someone too senior, you run the risk that they won't be execution-focused, and it will be difficult/impossible to level the candidate if things don't work out. A stretch VP is a good way to reduce risk.

5/ Overinvest in intrinsics. This candidate is going to be accepting a very difficult job. Make sure they have the intrinsics that will make them successful in a high-pressure startup environment — grit, humility, adaptability, and curiosity. More on that here. Also, this is hard to do, but make sure the candidate is someone that is at a stage in their life and career they simply aren’t willing to fail. Some call this “personal exceptionalism” — more on that here.

The 10 Best Books I Read In 2019

My wife and I celebrated our honeymoon in the winter of 2019 on the beaches of Thailand. That gave me lots of extra reading time. In 2019, I read some great books on business, history, religion, and lots of books on leadership. I even found a couple of fiction books that I loved. Below is a list of the top 10 books I read in 2019. See past lists here.

1/ Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman. An excellent book with practical advice that tells it like it is. Startups are beginning to get a reputation as glamourous. They aren't. They are really, really hard. Hoffman — an early employee at PayPal and the founder of LinkedIn — describes it this way:

"Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down; being resource-efficient lets you "glide" to minimize the rate of descent, giving you the time to learn things about your market, technology, and team before you hit the ground."

Blitzscaling is a great book, especially for those joining a startup for the first time. 

2/ The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller. I'm a big fan of metrics. I generally like to use them as the foundation of the work that I do. "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," the old saying goes. This book is a quick read and gives several real-life examples of the danger of relying on metrics when the people that are reporting them are under lots of pressure. As an example, some cities will tout reduction in certain types of crimes due to pressure from the public. But when you dig deeper, you find that they're merely reclassifying crimes to lesser charges. This book is an entertaining reminder to be very careful about reacting too quickly to metrics. 

3/ Debt - The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Debt is a dense and long book that chronicles the history of debt going back 5,000 years before currencies, or even barter were established. It's incredibly instructive on how global markets came to be and what we can learn from the mistakes our ancestors made — highly recommended.

4/ What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz. Horowitz's first book — The Hard Thing About Hard Things — will become a management classic. And this one might as well. Horowitz uses some great analogies to talk about modern-day management — including the Japanese samurais, the leader of a prison gang, and the slave revolt in Haiti during the 18th century. The bottom line is that you can put your company values on your website, and you can talk about them all the time, but if you don't practice what you preach, it doesn't matter. Culture is the output of a company's actions. Culture is about what you are, not what you want to be.

5/ Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins. This is an autobiography by David Goggins, who is the epitome of someone going from a horrible childhood with unspeakable physical and mental abuse and transforming his life into immense success. Goggins is a former Navy SEAL turned motivational speaker. The thing I like most about this book and that he transformed his life simply by changing his attitude, owning his inner voice, and taking full ownership and accountability for his actions and choices. An extremely intense and inspiring book.

6/ Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna. I've been following Jerry's Reboot podcast for years. He's an executive coach and expert on getting the most out of leaders. This one gets pretty deep but it's one of the best books on leadership I've read in years. It forces you to look deeply at yourself and understanding how you became who you are. This is the starting point to the journey of becoming a better leader. I expect to come back to this one every now and then.

7/ VC: An American History by Tom Nicholas. VC is a great book on the history of the venture capital industry. From the whaling ships of the 1800s to modern-day Silicon Valley, this book covers everything. A great, comprehensive overview of this increasingly important asset class. 

8/ Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath. I think this is a must-read for managers. This book dives deep into the fundamental errors that humans apply to decision making. Confirmation bias, short-term emotion, overconfidence, reliance on our frame of reference can lead to disastrously bad decisions. Heath goes deep on all of these flaws to help at least make leaders aware of the potential mistakes we make.

9/ Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnLee Saxenian. This book discusses the battle between the tech ecosystems of Silicon Valley and Eastern Massachusetts during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I'm biased because I grew up in the middle of this battle and found it fascinating. But the broader lessons from this book will be interesting to any follower of technology and culture. I wrote a blog post earlier this year expanding on some of my thoughts on this topic.

10/ The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance by Tom Brady. I was stunned by how much I liked this book. It's really well written, and Brady's approach to health, longevity, and habits is enormously inspiring. The book doesn't tell us all that much that we don't already know (sleep and hydration are immensely important), but seeing the details of the lifestyle of an incredibly committed and disciplined athlete is something we can all take something from.

Finally, a couple of fiction recommendations. The first is from my cousin Tom. I love all of his books, and his most recent one, The Perfect Liar, was as good as it gets. The second one that I absolutely loved was Goodnight Stranger by Miciah Bay Gault. 

I hope you enjoy some or all of these.

Business Models & Tech

This somewhat dated (2015) but still highly relevant essay by Alex Danco offers an insightful overview of the state of software in healthcare. If you care about this sort of thing, I highly recommend reading it.

The most interesting aspect of the piece for me is the reminder that when tech impacts or “disrupts” an industry, the tech isn’t necessarily the interesting part. The interesting part is the business models that change or emerge as a result of the tech.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:

Spotify leveraged technology to change the business model of music from $10 per album to 40 million songs for $10 a month.

AirBnB leveraged technology to change the hospitality business model, listing 6 million rooms and homes while owning zero properties. 

Uber leveraged technology to change the taxi business model, doing 4 million rides per day, while owning zero vehicles or taxi medallions.

As we consider how much software has impacted (or not impacted) healthcare, we shouldn’t be looking for the flashy, healthcare-specific, transformational technologies. We should consider the new and emerging business models that are enabled or enhanced by technologies. Those aren’t hard to find.

Things That Don't Scale

I recently started using Superhuman, the popular $30 per month email application, that's getting lots of buzz. It's a wonderful product. It solved my email overload problem.

I would've started using it sooner, but before they would grant me access, I had to complete a thirty-minute consultation with one of their staff members to configure my email and learn how to use the product most effectively. That seemed unnecessary to me, so I passed.

I eventually got desperate and agreed to the consultation. I now see why they force this — they go deep on how you use email, do some real-time customizations, and make sure you know how to use the product. All of this makes users much less likely to churn.

That said, it's surprising that Superhuman, an application with thousands and thousands of users, would make this kind of investment in onboarding new users. For a $30 per month consumer email application, this seems like the definition of something that won't scale.

I recently came across an interview with Superhuman's co-founder, Rahul Vohra, where he talked about the importance of these consultations and was asked if he thinks they can scale. He responded by saying that organizations need to identify the things they do that won't scale and decide which of them they should keep on doing. These are things that, from the outside, may seem small and wasteful but are actually core differentiators consistent with the heart of the organization's strategy and competitive advantage.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. As an organization scales, the things that aren't scaling start to become really obvious. And smart companies find ways to outsource, automate or completely stop doing them.

The hard part of all of this is identifying those things that, on the surface, seem like they obviously won't scale but actually drive big value.

At the Ritz-Carlton, every single employee (even the maintenance folks) has a budget of $2,000 per guest to make things right. On the spot, without asking.

Zocdoc, the medical appointment booking service, sends a $10 Amazon gift card to users every time a doctor reschedules an appointment.

Zappos maintains a 24/7 call center, posts their phone number on every page of their website, and doesn’t have a phone tree.

In the early days, most startups will tend to overinvest in high-touch and high-cost activities. They have to do this because they're forcing their way into a market. They can't cut corners and scale isn't an issue.

One-on-one product training. High-touch recruiting and employee onboarding. Ultra-fast customer service response times. Even small things like sending hand-written holiday cards to every customer. These are obvious and easy to do in the early days. But many of them won't scale and there’ll be pressure to stop doing them over time.

The easy part is dropping things that don’t scale. The hard part is continuing to do them.

Some Notes on Managing People

Earlier this week, my team went through a day and a half management training. It surfaced a bunch of things that I've learned about managing people over the last several years. I made some notes and thought I'd share them here.

1/ Some managers see their role as being the one that needs to smooth things over. This is the wrong approach. As Karl Marx said, it's best to "sharpen the contradictions." Bring the conflict up to the surface so everyone can see it and deal with it.

2/ When managing managers, sometimes the most important thing you can do is help them make the hard decisions they already know they need to make. Give them the support, safety, and clarity to execute on the hard stuff.

3/ Self-awareness and general awareness are two of the most crucial attributes of a leader. You have to know how you're being perceived and you have to know the issues on the team. You have to be in touch with the 'water cooler talk'. You have to make sure people understand that you know what's going on in their worlds. A clueless leader is the worst kind of leader.

4/ Create a habit of regularly expressing unsolicited gratitude to your reports. This is rocket fuel from an engagement and loyalty perspective.

5/ Use the writer/editor analogy when thinking about how much leverage you're getting from your reports. If you're doing a lot of writing, you're not getting enough leverage.

6/ Giving feedback is a muscle. When you do it a lot, it's easy. When you don't do it a lot, it's hard. Make giving feedback a regular part of the way you interact with your team.

7/ In a conflict, try to understand the other person's argument so well that you can make their argument for them with more clarity than they can. Don't make your argument until you can do this.

Collaboration & Enterprise Software

Kevin Kwok wrote a must read piece a few weeks ago about how crucial it is for collaboration to be a fundamental, “first party” aspect of enterprise software.

People think of Slack as a collaboration tool. But Kevin makes the point that a major reason Slack is so necessary (and valuable) is that other applications and business processes are fundamentally broken. You need Slack to fill in the gaps. You switch out of a productivity app (Salesforce) and move to a collaboration app (Slack) because Salesforce doesn’t have collaboration as a primary aspect of the product.

As an example, a sales manager might be in Salesforce and notice that a revenue number on a particular deal is inaccurate. The manager will go to Slack and send a message to the rep. The rep will respond in Slack and go fix the number in Salesforce. If Salesforce was truly collaborative, all of this communication would’ve happened inside of Salesforce. But it’s not. And that’s where Slack picks up the slack for non-collaborative business applications (pun intended). From the piece:

“The dream of Slack is that they become the central nervous system for all of a company’s employees and apps. This is the view of a clean *separation* of productivity and collaboration. Have all your apps for productivity and then have a single app for coordinating everyone, with your apps also feeding notifications into this system.

But productivity *isn’t* separate from collaboration.

.…

It’s not that Slack is too distracting and killing individual productivity. It’s that your company’s processes are so dysfunctional you need Slack to be distracting and killing individual productivity.”

For the first 10 to 15 years of my career, I used Microsoft Office applications. I didn’t consider anything else. They had a total monopoly. In the last five or so years that has completely changed. I never use Word or PowerPoint (I still use Excel frequently). For word processing and presentations I almost exclusively use Google Docs and Google Slides. I’ve made this change for one reason and one reason only: collaboration. G Suite (Google’s suite of productivity applications) is fundamentally built on collaboration. It works really well. Collaboration in Microsoft Office applications is clunky and was clearly an afterthought. It’s very difficult to start with productivity only, run that playbook for several years and then back into collaboration. Collaboration from the outset makes things a lot easier.

Healthcare software is suffering greatly from the fact that the software clinicians use didn’t have collaboration as a fundamental part of the code. Most medical software was rushed to market in response to government incentives and collaboration across different organizations wasn’t important. Now, like Microsoft Office tried to do, many of these applications are trying to back into collaboration as a fundamental feature and it’s not working.

This is one of many reasons that PatientPing exists and is growing so quickly. Our software puts collaboration first. Our entire platform is built around collaboration and allowing disparate healthcare organizations to collaborate on shared patients. We’ve tapped into a desperate need because of the way healthcare software was developed. If collaboration had been build into healthcare software from the beginning, our product wouldn’t be in such demand.

Similarly, Slack is widely touted as the fastest growing business application in history. Not to take anything away from their success, but much of the reason for their success is that Slack picks up the slack of so many other widely distributed productivity applications across nearly every industry. The lack of fundamental collaboration in productivity apps created the conditions for Slack’s massive success.