In 429 BC, Plato declared that an individual should only be limited by their own ambition. In 2014, Plative was founded to help clients tap into their ambition in the modern world. Today, the global consulting firm empowers businesses to leverage technology – from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to customer relationship management (CRM) solutions – to unleash their teams’ true potential and drive innovation. A Certified Great Place to Work, Plative has seen consistent, exponential growth over the past decade, and has earned a spot on the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest Growing Companies for the past six consecutive years.
To create strong client connections and build successful relationships, Plative brought in Slack from the start. Optimised for the era of AI-powered work, Slack is a conversation-first work operating system that’s connected to all your apps and data, empowering teams to search, collaborate and take action faster. By using Slack, Plative employees spend less time catching up on account details, and more time building solutions for clients. ‘Slack is ingrained in our bloodstream in our delivery organisation,’ said Miftah Khan, SVP, Head of Professional Services. ‘We couldn’t do our jobs without Slack.’
Most recently, Plative has tapped into Slack AI to bring its productivity to a new level, especially on the sales side. Before, keeping tabs on untapped opportunities took hours out of sellers’ days, and account planning cost up to eight hours per account per quarter, sapping valuable resources from the business each quarter.
‘Slack AI has transformed our collaboration platform into a dynamic repository of customer and prospect activity. It has accelerated our growth and delivered substantial impact to our customers.’
Slack ties Plative’s teams together with AI, pulling projects, data, apps and knowledge into one central location, right where they’re already working. ‘From HR to payroll, from Jira to Google Docs, everything we use is integrated with Slack or connected via Slack’s API,’ said Chief Executive Officer Paulo Kaiser. ‘All the tools we use for collaboration are intertwined in Slack – something that would be impossible in email,’ said Khan.
Since implementing Slack AI, Plative has doubled its upsell opportunity volume. ‘Slack AI has transformed our collaboration platform into a dynamic repository of customer and prospect activity,’ said Kaiser. ‘It has enabled us to automate workflows and deliver solutions swiftly, accelerating our company’s growth, delivering substantial impact to our customers and becoming the front end to most of our applications.’
With all the information and tools that they need at their fingertips, teams across the company use Slack to move work forwards. ‘Slack is a growth accelerator for us; it’s like a substrate that allows us to foster collaboration across tools and geographies between all relevant parties,’ said Khan.
Innovating and accelerating growth at the speed of AI
Plative is a remote-first company, and its 160 employees are spread out around the globe. From the time they log out on Monday to the time they log back in on Tuesday, a single team member might have numerous messages and alerts for any given project. Slack AI synthesises what team members need to know.
‘You could scroll through endless messages on various platforms, or you could just use Slack AI to get a very clean, on-demand description of what happened,’ said Chief Revenue Officer Greg DelGenio. AI-powered channel and thread summaries instantly summarise conversations, allowing users to catch up in a single click. ‘Slack AI summaries save us multiple hours per week, per resource.’
When you consider all the knowledge accumulated in a Slack channel, from pre-sales to post-delivery, over the course of months, it’s seemingly insurmountable. ‘But Slack AI can find all relevant references in an instant, empowering every team to take action faster,’ said Khan.
Slack AI’s native features are easy to use and require no training. ‘We rolled out Slack AI in approximately 30 minutes because it took zero implementation,’ said DelGenio. The powerfully simple AI taps into the years of conversations, projects and data that Plative has built up in Slack since 2014. By referencing this deep reservoir of contextual knowledge, Slack AI can prioritise and deliver exactly what they need to know, when they need to know it. Plus, it’s built on Slack’s secure, trusted infrastructure so that Plative remains in full control of their data.
‘Before, catching up after taking time off could take hours of scrolling, or worse, meetings. Now we can easily catch up with Slack AI’s channel summaries for any specified date range. They’re an absolute game-changer.’
Previously, finding customer launch dates, project details and more would take valuable time away from customers’ projects and selling. Now, they just use Slack AI’s search function, which surveys past projects, teams and topics that are already in Slack to find the answers. ‘With Slack, you can get up to speed on an account in 30 seconds as opposed to trying to book a 30-minute call with a project manager. It saves us so much time,’ said DelGenio.
They’ve also built a custom feature connecting Slack’s API to their meeting conferencing solution. After every call, the AI feature summarises the meeting, detects a sentiment and posts notes in the #signals channel, reminiscent of a traffic light. There’s usually a consistent sea of greens: ‘We’ll often take a screenshot of the greens and share it on the #general channel to celebrate,’ said DelGenio. If there’s a yellow or red sentiment detected, the channel acts as an early warning system, triggering a Slack workflow that notifies leadership. ‘No customer wants to fill in a “How did we do?” form,’ he said. ‘It’s on us to get that sentiment and proactively do something about it before it becomes a problem.’
Plative’s new business continues to scale, and its existing business has also grown 40% quarter on quarter. ‘Part of that growth is a result of tailoring the customer experience: we really want to know our customers, their challenges, what ideas they might like,’ said DelGenio. ‘Knowledge is critical to our mission, and Slack AI helps us both find and understand all the data we have at our fingertips so that we can better serve customers.’
‘Knowledge is critical to our mission, and Slack AI helps us both find and understand all the data we have at our fingertips so that we can better serve customers.’
Generating account plans in half the time with ‘Plaito’
Taking innovation one step further, Plative leveraged Slack’s platform to build a custom app called ‘Plaito’ that connects all their data sources with Slack, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Tableau and Google Calendar. ‘We’ve integrated everything we use – with a very, very small development team – because of the infinite extensibility of Slack’s amazing development framework,’ said Khan. ‘We tried other products and it doesn’t even come close, especially with the Block Kit Builder. Slack makes it easy to build and roll out powerful apps.’
One way that Plative’s sales teams use Plaito is to retrieve critical information for any given account, including industry, employee size, annual revenue and key links. Using smart commands, they can see that company’s tech stack, or, for example, who they should contact to discuss their ERP system. Plaito not only offers a list of relevant contacts, it also tells the user why they’re relevant, and includes their LinkedIn profiles.
What’s more, reps can use Plaito on the go. ‘When you open up Plaito in Slack mobile, it’s amazing, and it took very little effort to make it as efficient, productive and easy to use as the desktop version,’ said Khan.
‘Instead of looking around aimlessly for hours, you just ask Plaito a question in plain English in Slack,’ said Khan. It took one person to build Plaito, and it’s already giving sales reps back 50% of their time.
When a deal is lost, teams can also use Plaito to gain back momentum. ‘We get a notification in the #revenue-operations channel, along with helpful information about the lost opportunity,’ said DelGenio. The team updates the competitor’s battle card and studies the data so that they can improve for next time. Plative’s CEO also has visibility on the channel, allowing him to make the most informed decisions at a higher level. ‘There’s so much good information in Salesforce, and Slack proactively serves you all the right data, right when you need it,’ said DelGenio.
‘As a consulting organisation, knowledge is power. Knowledge is an enabler, and there’s so much knowledge in Slack.’
Syncing with clients and accelerating deals in Slack Connect
To fast-track deals and keep clients informed and supported in real time, Plative uses a combination of internal Slack channels and Slack Connect, which extends the functionality of Slack to external partners.
After the introduction call with a customer, the account owner sets up an internal Slack channel with all relevant team members, from developers to solution architects. ‘We put everyone in the Slack channel so they can transfer knowledge, and it’s off to the races,’ said DelGenio.
The second channel is with the client through Slack Connect. ‘We use Slack Connect as our deal room,’ said DelGenio. ‘We can send proposals and get comments back in real time without having to play calendar Tetris.’ The client channel also includes a customised canvas that makes it easy to find, manage and share relevant details, such as their Jira board and who they can contact for help. ‘We put all relevant data right where they’re already working, and that early connection facilitates collaboration and often sets us apart from our competitors.’
Both channels evolve with the deal, with Plative adding and removing resources as necessary. ‘From initial prospecting to working together on deals, our entire front-to-back life cycle is in Slack,’ said Khan.
‘Our clients spend a lot of money with us, and should have dedicated support every step of the way. With Slack Connect, our customers can reach out at all times, allowing us to deliver the best possible experience.’
Connecting across the globe to scale a collaborative culture
Plative started in the US, but now has a large presence in India, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Canada. ‘Our global growth is fuelled by our ability to be a very effective virtual team that can work asynchronously, and Slack is a big part of that,’ said Khan.
Slack keeps everyone on the same page without adding the stress of yet another meeting. ‘We also use Slack huddles and voice clips in place of meetings, saving everyone so much time,’ DelGenio said. ‘With Slack, it’s one continuous thread of productive, asynchronous work.’
Culturally, teams take time to celebrate everything from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts to sales wins. There’s also an impressive library of purely social channels, whether you are a cook, love gardening or want to volunteer outside work. ‘There are many Slack communities at Plative where we can be there for each other, and it really builds a nurturing environment,’ said Khan.
Business Development Manager Jessica Daly agrees: ‘Slack provides a community hub where we can celebrate each other as people. It helps us feel super connected in a remote world.’
Indeed, Slack has shaped Plative into a collaborative workplace that recognises hard work and encourages camaraderie. ‘The first thing I noticed when I came to Plative and started living and breathing in Slack is how lighthearted and social it is,’ said Khan. ‘The cultural impact of Slack, and the teamwork it encourages – especially when we’re working so hard for our clients – is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.’
