Former Slack employee Johnny Rodgers describes Slack’s integration into Salesforce in fall 2021 as a collision of workplace habits. His retrospective Building Slack account follows those differences from internal support to sales, then recounts Stewart Butterfield’s decision to leave.
At Salesforce’s Vancouver office, Rodgers writes, his reserved desk had no keyboard. The TechForce desk that could help was open on Thursdays; it was Tuesday. The episode illustrates a broader contrast in his account: at Slack, he says, employees asked for help in a channel and got a response from a person. At Salesforce, they filed tickets and received automated emails. Rodgers acknowledges that the companies operated at very different scales, but says the change was still a shock for him and those around him.
A different way to sell Slack
Rodgers describes a sales mismatch: Salesforce sold products to leaders of individual business functions, while Slack required buy-in across an executive team. Cal Henderson, quoted by Rodgers, said Salesforce sales staff were not really using Slack, particularly in Sales, and tended to sell products they understood better. Rodgers separately writes that Slack was not a “dashboard metric” for Salesforce reps, giving them little incentive to sell it.
Dave Macnee, whom Rodgers identifies as a Slack Customer Success leader, recalls Salesforce colleagues tagging people in Slack threads without context. Macnee saw the habit as an email-like way of passing information around that missed Slack’s emphasis on courtesy.
