Sales

How We Improved Our Sales Workflow with Slack

November 16, 2015

We use Slack a lot at Keen IO. We’re constantly using and building Slack integrations to improve our workflow. We’re actually kind of obsessed. We realized we needed a way to aid our sales and customer success workflows on Slack, so we built a tool that lets people type a command that looks like this: /company slack.com. And pulls up a response like this:

Slack /company

The company info is retrieved from Clearbit’s API. This has been incredibly useful for our Sales and Customer Success teams when they need to look up information about a new signup or an existing customer.

We’ve open sourced all of the code on Github. If you want to use this integration for your own company just follow these steps:

What You’ll  Need

Follow These Steps

  1. Grab your Clearbit API key
  2. Create a Slack Incoming Webhook (you can reuse an existing one)
  3. Copy the webhook URL – you’ll need that later
  4. Create a Slack slash command. Preferably /company for the command. The URL should point to your Pushpop instance, on the /slack/company path. Copy the Token – you’ll need that later
  5. Create a new job in your Pushpop instance, using the company info source.
  6. Add all of the environment variables:
    1. CLEARBIT_KEY is the Clearbit API key from Step 1
    2. SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL is the webhook URL from Step 2
    3. SLACK_TOKEN_COMPANY is the slash command token from Step 3
  7. Restart Pushpop (make sure you’re running pushpop as a webserver)
  8. Type /company keen.io into Slack!

Look Up Individual People

We can also look up information on individual people.

This creates a slash command that will retrieve info about a person (via email address) from Clearbit, and send it back in to Slack.

The person info will look like this in Slack:

Person Lookup

Setting Up the /Person Command

  1. Grab your Clearbit API key
  2. Create a Slack Incoming Webhook (you can reuse an existing one)
  3. Copy the webhook URL – you’ll need that later
  4. Create a Slack slash command Preferably /person for the command
  5. The URL should point to your Pushpop instance, on the /slack/person path. Copy the Token – you’ll need that later
  6. Create a new job in your Pushpop instance, using the person info source.
  7. Add all of the environment variables
    1. CLEARBIT_KEY is the Clearbit API key from Step 1
    2. SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL is the webhook URL from Step 2
    3. SLACK_TOKEN_COMPANY is the slash command token from Step 3
  8. Restart Pushpop (make sure you’re running pushpop as a webserver)
  9. Type /person [email protected] into slack!

That’s it! Check it out on github to learn more. If you have any questions or ideas of your own drop by our community Slack channel.

Open Source Developer

Joe Wegner is a Open Source Developer at <a href="https://keen.io/">Keen IO</a>. He specializes in PHP and Javascript, with a focus on developing web-based applications in Node.js. He is also the Owner of Wegner Design.