If you’re running a startup or a small or midsize business (SMB), every second counts. And that’s where Slack (Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge — S-L-A-C-K) comes in. It’s the center of productivity for your small business or startup — or any sized business for that matter. It connects your team, partners, and customers, supporting real-time, in person, or remote.
Let’s dig into the best tips and tricks small businesses rely on Slack for to swap busywork for high-impact work.
What is Slack?
Slack is a communication and collaboration app that connects people to the information they need to do their jobs.
Slack brings together the right people in one place around a shared goal, project, or initiative to create visibility and alignment across your startup or small business. With access to key information, it’s helpful to have some strategies for focusing on what’s most important to you.
Nine Slack hacks for your startup
Slack is designed to be an approachable, usable, and simple software that gets you what you need when you need it. Here are slack hacks for your startup or SMB:
1. Smartly reply to routine questions with AI-powered Slackbot
Slackbot is an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions, set reminders, and even make suggestions. You can customize it to provide specific responses or perform certain actions based on messages your teammates share in channels or DMs.
For example, it can quickly answer common questions like, “When is the next team meeting?” to keep people in sync without interrupting their workflow. Or if someone asks about current job openings, it can automatically pull information from your applicant tracking system (ATS) and share it in the chat.
Slackbot can also be customized to:
- Automate your tasks: Automate routine tasks like sending daily reports, tracking project progress, or onboarding new team members.
- Integrate your favorite tools: Integrate with other tools to provide real-time updates and alerts, keeping everyone informed.
- Increase engagement: Build a more engaged team culture by sending out polls, sharing fun facts, or facilitating icebreaker activities.
Slackbot’s Smart Replies suggest responses to messages, saving you time on crafting and executing timely emails. These replies get smarter over time, adapting to your team’s unique communication style and needs. The more you use it, the more helpful it becomes. This can help users respond more quickly to common queries or prompts.
It helps startups with:
- Meeting confirmations: Instantly confirm or reschedule meetings with suggested replies.
- Customer support: Quickly respond to common customer queries, improving response times and satisfaction.
- FAQs: Automatically suggest answers to frequently asked questions within your team.
- Tracking tasks: Acknowledge tasks or requests with a single click, moving workflows along without disruption.
2. Automate routine tasks with Workflow Builder
Workflow Builder allows your team to automate routine tasks using a visual interface. It’s powered by AI to help streamline processes like approvals, requests, and more — allowing Slack to own more of the operations while your team focuses on the strategy and customer engagement. The best part is you don’t need to be a tech nerd to build a workflow. In fact, 80% of those who built Slack workflow don’t have a technical background.
Slack’s Workflow Builder helps you automate routine tasks and streamline processes with ease. Here’s how it can power up your startup:
- Automated approvals: Reduce unnecessary steps for approving budgets, time-off requests, or deliverables. No more chasing down approvals with ad-hoc emails or messages.
- New-hire onboarding: Automate welcome messages, document sharing, and introductory tasks to get new team members up to speed quickly.
- Meeting scheduling: Simplify the back-and-forth of meeting scheduling with automated workflows that find the best time for everyone.
For example, let’s say you’re a small marketing agency planning a new camapignyou can plan a marketing campaign as a small agency. Instead of waiting for weekly meetings to discuss campaign progress, you can set up an automated workflow that sends reminders to your team members to update their project statuses and deadlines in real-time — allowing you to stay in sync asynchronously. You can create another workflow to that automatically prompts team members every Friday to submit their updates on ongoing campaigns. And you can iIntegrate these feedback loops — where clients can provide input directly through Slack — ensuring that adjustments can be made fast.
3. Find what you need when you need it with AI-powered search, threads, and recaps
Did you know Slack AI users can save 97 mins weekly on average?
Slack’s AI-enhanced search is your ultimate time-saver and knowledge hub. It delivers relevant results, understanding context to suggest pertinent messages, files, or channels. Slack AI can summarize any thread or channel to help your team members catch up on missed discussions. That means when your team goes out on vacation or has a full day of back-to-back meetings, they can get up to speed on what they missed faster than ever. Slack AI can also schedule daily recaps of your most important channels, so your team can stay aligned without reading every chapter or going through extensive chat histories.
For small busineses, speed is everything. Thread and recap summaries allow your team to continue operating with high agility by:
- Making quick decisions: Get instant access to past discussions, data, or reports without digging into long files.
- Project management: Easily locate updates, timelines, and deliverables to stay on track.
- Customer support: Resolve customer issues quickly by finding previous tickets, solutions, or customer history.
- Knowledge sharing: Effortlessly share insights and announcements.
4. Collaborate any time, anywhere with Slack Connect
As an SMB owner, you know it’s important to have constant, clear, and effective communication with clients and partners. Slack Connect helps you to communicate securely with external stakeholders directly within the platform, eliminating the need to toggle between Slack and email. Everything just lives in Slack — ensuring real-time transparency internally and externally.
Slack Connect can help SMBs combine their highest-priority conversations to live in Slack:
- External collaboration: Work with people from other companies, connecting your own team to your business development partners, vendors, or customers.
- Decrease response times: Enable faster communication and quicker responses through Slack without waiting for slow-to-respond email.
- Speed up sales cycles: Accelerate the sales process through efficient internal and external communication.
5. Use Templates to create a standardized structure for new channels
Templates, currently available on desktop only, give you the ability to customize new channels to create standardized processes across your organization.
With a bit of customization, you can have Slack automatically create new channels that have a pre-populated Canvas, Slackbot that requests team updates every Friday afternoon, and standardized project tracker via Lists.
Templates help your company become more operationally efficient by creating clear standardization for specific channel types:
- Send messages faster: You can send the same Slack messages to different team mates at the same time and get eyeballs on it faster than any email in an inbox.
- Be consistent: Templates create consistency and require minimal effort for repeatable conversations and actions.
- Build your own operating rhythm: You can build your own specific template according to how your team gets things done.
6. Skip the wall of text, send a Clip
With Clips, you can record audio or video messages to your team so you can deliver important updates with more authenticity and less text. Simply record and post audio, video, and screen recordings to communicate easily with your team, regardless of their time zone or location. You can use clips to share ideas and updates, or just to say hello.
7. In-the-moment huddles > scheduled meetings
Huddles are another way to help reduce meeting overload. Hardly anything is as stressful as a calendar full of meetings, but with Slack for small business, you can reduce the chaos of days of back-to-back meetings to give your team more time to get work done. With one click, you can open an audio or video chat in your channel or DM and start knocking out ad-hoc items for discussion.
8. Send your messages at the right time with Schedule Send
Slack’s built-in schedule message feature allows you to send messages at a future time.
Keep your team informed with schedule send. Scheduling messages to post at a future date and time is a great way to promote peace of mind. Know that your announcement, meeting agenda, or other important message will be delivered to the team right on time, even if you’ll be handling something else or away from the screen at the time.
Best of all, it’s super easy to-do! Here’s how:
- Compose your message like you always do.
- Instead of clicking “Send” or immediately hitting “Enter,” click the downward arrow just to the right of the Send button.
- Choose one of the suggested times, or schedule your message to post at a custom time of your choosing.
And don’t forget one of our all-time favorite features — ‘Remind Me Later’. That one speaks for itself when you’re busy up to your ears and get assigned something in Slack — remind me later will pop up when you have the time to dedicate to it.
9. Never miss a message from the people you collaborate with most
Priority channels and VIP DMs are standout features in Slack designed to ensure you never miss important messages.
Channels are a great way to stay organized. Just set up a channel for your team (such as #sales-team or #finance-team), invite all of your team members to join, and post important announcements, files, and updates to the channel. Using team channels to communicate announcements, status updates, event, or deadline reminders helps move work forward faster, creating fewer meetings. With priority channels, you can prioritize (star) your most important channels, making them easily accessible and visually distinct in your sidebar. This helps you quickly focus on the conversations that matter most.
Meanwhile, VIP DMs and channels, allow you to mark key team members or contacts as VIPs, ensuring their direct messages always rise to the top of your inbox. This feature is particularly useful for staying connected with your most important collaborators, even during a busy workday.
Together, these features help streamline your communication and keep you organized, ensuring that high-priority messages never get lost in the shuffle.
Hack Slack for your small business
Slack for small business is your company’s productivity center. It connects everyone in your organization to the apps, vendors, customers, and data needed to work efficiently. Hacks like these are just the beginning of how you can get more done using Slack.
