How is the development of Slack’s partner ecosystem going? 

It’s been over a year now since the acquisition (by Salesforce) closed and there’s been a lot of investment in maturing the co-selling between our respective sales organizations. It offers us a huge opportunity to bring Slack into a lot of mature Salesforce customers who need Slack or something like Slack.

Our product teams have done a phenomenal job in creating integrated experiences between Slack and the core Salesforce offerings. And that leads into helping customers understand the art of the possible with Slack. … So I feel like that’s maturing really well. How this relates to partners … we’ve been doubling down on a specific subset of that ecosystem to really help them hone their skills on Slack.

And that was the initial announcement – onboarding those initial partners. … And we’ve been working with them not only to build out their capabilities and capacity around getting certified, so they’re starting to really build their bench of certifications, but also helping them to develop their first set of solutions.

Initially, we’ve been focusing them on building LOB (line of business) solutions, focusing on sales, service, because ultimately that’s where the momentum was going.

Post-launch was like, ‘How do we create an integrated experience with Sales Cloud? How do we create an integrated experience with Service Cloud?’ That’s where our product marketing was most robust. So when we think about leveraging and repurposing the assets that we use for customers to then educate partners, that’s naturally where we gravitated toward.

But as part of our overall maturity of selling with and co-selling with the Salesforce sellers, Salesforce is heavily aligned to industry OUs (operating units) … So in an effort to do that, we pivoted our selling to be industry focused. And that has offered up a phenomenal opportunity for our partners because … that’s how our partners think. They align to industry. They have deep industry expertise. And in many ways, they are far more credible than most vendors at talking industry.