Salesforce-owned workspace collaboration platform Slack said its freemium model and artificial intelligence offerings, especially with automated data insights, are seeing strong traction in the Indian market. In conversation with Jatin Grover, Slack India country manager Rahul Sharma said India’s growth for the company is refusing to slow down owing to higher demand for enterprise productivity platforms like Slack, and opportunity from the untapped user base of Salesforce.
What is driving the growth for Slack in India, especially after its acquisition by Salesforce?
There are two things which are very big driving factors for Slack’s growth in India now. The first is obviously AI. The second is post-acquisition, there is a lot of integration that has happened between Slack and the Salesforce products. For example, we have something called Slack Elevate, a way of bringing in all of your sales cloud data into Slack, without logging into the sales CRM (customer relationship management) tool. That gives a very powerful way of being able to unlock enterprise productivity. We have seen some very deep Integrations happening now, with service cloud inside of Slack to solve customers’ issues.
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On leveraging AI, one of the areas which Slack is focusing on is putting to use unstructured sources of data that Slack or any organisation that uses Slack has. Using AI, companies can marry unstructured data with structured to get powerful insights. For example, a CEO can ask Slack about the best-performing region and the data would be readily available. Across businesses, 70-90% of business happens in unstructured format.
How big is Slack’s India team and what is their contribution?
There are no Slack employees, we are all Salesforce employees. Some of the good features, like the Huddle feature, the ability for quick video-audio screen sharing, chat tool, were developed by a team in India. There’s a lot of work that we are doing from a reliability standpoint, in terms of uptime, in terms of quality on the platform, which is built out of India as well.
You have talked about India being your top 10 markets. Have you seen the metric improved?
Over the last four years, we have just seen growth accelerating. It’s refusing to slow down, and I hope that it continues to be the same going forward as well.
Software as a service (SaaS) companies usually face problems of lower average ticket size in India. Some headwinds there?
Not seeing that at all because the growth is coming from Salesforce’s customer base in India, some of them, who were not using Slack. Also, if earlier, Slack used to operate only by acquiring customers on its own, now it’s got the power of the Salesforce ecosystem, and the customer base that is there, which has not used Slack.
How do you see the feasibility of freemium models and how has been the conversion to paid models?
For Slack, the foundation of growth in India has been the free user base. India has one of the largest free user bases for Slack across the world. It starts from educational institutions like IITs where a lot of students are using Slack to be the medium of community building inside that educational institution. So once they start using that as a free product, most of them go forward and launch their own companies, and join companies which leads to increased demand for Slack.
For Slack, what is the rate of conversion from free to paid?
While we may not be able to share company-specific data, any B2B organisation that could manage 1-1.5% of its freemium base was a successful business. Slack was able to do far more than that. Increasingly, year after year, we are seeing companies on freemium business models shortening the time to become profitable.
For Slack there is an opportunity as when a company or startup grows its team, they would require premium features such as integration with other technologies like Google Drive, message history, etc, which are available on the Business version of Slack. This is how Slack gets monetised.
Now, AI assisting, recapping and summarising messages also is bringing productivity to enterprises.
From: financialexpress
Financial News
