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Author: Julie Matkin

  • Slack Has a Triage Layer Built In

    Slack Has a Triage Layer Built In

    When you’re running a sales team, Slack is noisy and it moves fast. A rep pings you with a pricing question while you’re mid-call. Someone drops a deal update in a channel you clock but can’t act on right now. You notice how a rep handled an objection and think “I want to bring that up in their next 1:1”. Then the next thing comes in, and that thought is gone.

    By the end of the day you’ve lost a dozen things that needed something from you.

    You’re not disorganised. You’re just managing through a tool that was built for conversation, not triage. Everything lands in the same flow and your only options are act now or lose it.

    Slack has a built-in fix for this.

    The Later tab

    Hover over any message and a bookmark icon appears. Click it and the message gets saved to your Later tab, sitting in the left sidebar. The original conversation carries on, nothing gets marked as read, and you get back to what you were doing. Nothing disappears.

    On its own, it’s a marginally useful bookmarking feature.

    With a daily routine built around it, it’s closer to a management inbox:

    The triage habit

    Once a day, at a fixed time, open Later and work through everything in it. The question for each item is simple: what does this actually need?

    Some things need a reply. Some need to go into HubSpot against the deal record. Some belong in a 1:1, either because something went well and is worth naming, or because something needs addressing before it becomes a pattern. Some are worth raising with the team. And some, with a bit of distance, turn out to need nothing at all.

    That last category is worth noting. A lot of what feels urgent at 11am looks different at 5pm. The Later tab lets you save it without reacting to it, and the daily review lets you make that call with a clearer head.

    The 1:1 angle

    This is where the habit earns its keep. Save a message when a rep handles something well: a tight objection response, a smart question on a discovery call, a piece of competitive intel they surfaced. By the time the 1:1 comes around you’ve got a concrete list rather than trying to reconstruct the past two weeks from memory.

    Same works in the other direction. Save something you want to address properly rather than letting it slide or reacting in the moment when you’re already annoyed about three other things.

    Without something like this, 1:1s drift toward whatever’s loudest that week. With it, they reflect what actually happened.

    What it isn’t

    The Later tab isn’t a task manager. It doesn’t connect to HubSpot, doesn’t fire reminders on its own, and it’s yours alone. If something needs to be assigned or tracked properly, it still needs to go somewhere that does that.

    But for the problem of things vanishing in the noise of a busy day, it’s a lightweight fix that needs nothing to set up. Just the habit of opening it.

  • Forecast Call Bingo

    Forecast Call Bingo

  • Forecast-O-Matic

    Forecast-O-Matic

    The Sales Manager’s Field Manual & Decoder Ring

    YOUR PIPELINE CALLED.
    THE FORECAST IS IN.

    ► FORECAST TELEX ►

    “System ready. Your pipeline has opinions, and it’s been waiting to share them. Actuate the plunger to receive the forecast.”

    YOUR CHAMPION WILL ‘PURSUE’ OPPORTUNITIES RETROACTIVE DISCOUNT REQUESTED FOR ‘VIBES’ THE COFFEE MACHINE BROKE; MORALE IS AT 0% THEY WILL DECIDE TO ‘CIRCLE BACK’ (IN Q3 2027) THIS DEAL’S STATUS WILL BE: ‘IT’S COMPLICATED’ THE TRIAL WILL ENTER A ‘PERMANENT EVALUATION’ LOOP THE ‘GREAT CALL’ WILL BE FOLLOWED BY A GREAT SILENCE PLOT TWIST: IT WAS A ‘GHOST OPPORTUNITY!’ SURPRISE! A NEW STAKEHOLDER JOINS THE CHAT THIS DEAL WILL BE ‘JUST AWAITING SIGN-OFF’ (6 WEEKS) PROCUREMENT WILL DISAPPEAR INTO THE VOID THIS ‘COMMITTED’ DEAL WILL COMMIT… TO NEXT QUARTER FORECAST-O-MATIC! ARE YOU FEELING LUCKY?
    FORECAST LEDGER LOG:
    ★ SYSTEM READY: Press mechanical Plunger to calculate forecast.
    ▶ OUTCOME 1 ACTIVE

  • HubSpot Workflows + Slack: What to Watch Out For

    HubSpot Workflows + Slack: What to Watch Out For

    HubSpot workflows are a reasonable place to start when you want to get CRM activity into Slack. For simple, high-signal triggers, they do the job. The trouble is that you can get pretty deep into designing one before you realise it has a critical limitation.

    This isn’t a reason to avoid them. It’s a reason to know what you’re getting into.

    Where they work well

    If you haven’t used them before, the short version is: inside any HubSpot workflow, you can add a “send a Slack notification” step that fires a message to a channel or a user when the trigger conditions are met. That is the whole mechanism.

    The sweet spot is a single clear trigger with a single clear action. These work because the logic is simple, the recipient is obvious, and the message has a natural next step. Good examples:

    • A new inbound lead that needs a fast response
    • A deal moving to a key pipeline stage
    • A high-value form submission
    • A deal marked closed-won, so the success team knows to spin up their onboarding process or create a task in their own pipeline before the rep has even sent the handoff email

    HubSpot lets you add action buttons to the notification, so someone can log a note or create a task without leaving Slack. For straightforward alerts like these, that’s genuinely useful.

    Where they fall apart

    Where did that message come from? Once you have a few workflows sending Slack notifications, tracing which workflow generated which message becomes harder than it should be. There is no sender label, no easy audit trail. If something is firing that should not be, finding the culprit takes longer than you would like.

    Who set all these up? Without a naming convention agreed on from the start, a list of Slack notification workflows quickly turns into an archaeological dig. Months later, nobody can tell which ones are still needed, which ones overlap, and which ones were built by someone who’s since left.

    Why does this look so basic? The messages themselves are fairly constrained. You can pull in properties and add buttons, but if you want something that reads well in a channel and gives people the right context at a glance, you’ll hit the ceiling of what the tool allows.

    Can I schedule this for Monday morning? Sort of. Timing options are limited, and anything involving a rolling time window gets complicated fast.

    Can it go to different channels depending on the deal? Not natively. The workflow action sends to a fixed, pre-selected Slack channel. Routing based on deal owner, region, or team means branching logic that gets unwieldy quickly, or bringing in a third-party tool.

    Wait, the date picker doesn’t do quarters? This one catches people out. If you want to build something like “alert me when a deal with a close date this quarter has its close date pushed to next quarter,” the date triggers don’t support rolling quarters. The whole workflow falls apart at the first step.

    What this means in practice

    Sending Slack notifications as part of a HubSpot workflow is a handy thing to know about. But the feature has its limits, and they tend to appear at the exact moment you’re trying to build something slightly more specific than the tool was designed for.

    Knowing that before you start saves you from building something you will have to unpick later.

  • Notification Overwhelm Isn’t Inevitable

    Notification Overwhelm Isn’t Inevitable

    One of your reps said it recently, maybe not to you directly: “I’ve got so many notifications I don’t read any of them.”

    That’s worth sitting with. Because if your team has stopped reading notifications, the problem isn’t Slack. It’s that everything got the same weight, and when everything is urgent, nothing is.

    The mess usually has an enthusiastic origin

    Most notification chaos on sales teams doesn’t come from neglect. It usually starts with good intentions and a HubSpot workflows tab.

    Deal stage changes, activity reminders, overdue tasks, lead assignments, pipeline thresholds: all firing into Slack. Each one individually defensible. Collectively, a wall of identical pings that your team learns, very quickly, to ignore.

    And that’s before you count everything else that’s been connected to Slack. Intercom, Jira, Google Calendar, whatever the team voted to add six months ago and nobody uses anymore. The HubSpot notifications are just the ones you built yourself.

    And once the ignore habit forms, it’s hard to break. You can send the most important message of the quarter into that channel and it lands with the same visual weight as a notification that a contact’s job title has been updated in HubSpot.

    Save your DMs for when they actually matter

    The same logic applies to any bot nudge you’ve set up to chase pipeline updates or prompt follow-ups. A bot reminder is easy to dismiss. A direct message from you asking where something stands is not. That difference matters, because you only get so many of the latter before people start dreading them.

    Use reminders for the things that genuinely need a prompt and they’ll land. Run them constantly and they become part of the noise, dismissed along with everything else.

    “Does this spark joy?”

    Most teams never do this. They add notifications over time and never go back. So go through them. For each one, ask: does someone actually need to know this right now? Not eventually. Not as a nice-to-have. Right now, in the middle of whatever they’re doing.

    Most of it won’t survive that question. A deal crossing a significant threshold probably does. A contact’s job title updating in HubSpot probably doesn’t. The things that require action today stay. Everything else gets moved somewhere people check on their own schedule.

    What this looks like in practice

    Next time a notification lands, stop for a second and ask whether it earns the right to be there.

    It sounds like small work compared to closing deals. But the notification environment your team works in determines whether something important actually gets seen or disappears into the feed with everything else. Just because you can automatically create a channel for every deal in the pipeline doesn’t mean you should.

  • The Slack command your sales team isn’t using

    The Slack command your sales team isn’t using

    If we had to pick one Slack feature that sales teams consistently underuse, /remind would be near the top of the list. Not because it is complicated. Because nobody ever showed them what it is actually for.

    What it can do

    You can set a reminder for yourself or for a whole channel. You can make it recurring. The syntax is plain English and it mostly just works:

    • every weekday
    • every Monday
    • every other Wednesday
    • on the 28th of every month

    What you type is what lands in the channel. If you want emoji, use the shortcode format like :memo: or :white_check_mark: rather than pasting them in directly. Bold text, bullet points, and headers do not show up.

    The reaction trick

    When a reminder fires in a channel it is a real Slack message, which means the team can react to it with emoji.

    Ask the team to react with :white_check_mark: when they have posted their standup. You can hover over that reaction at any point and see exactly who has responded and who has not, without sending a follow-up message or chasing anyone. The accountability is visible to the whole team, not just you. It is not surveillance. It is a shared scoreboard everyone can see.

    Five reminders worth setting up

    The best reminders do not just say “remember to do the thing.” They prompt a specific action or ask a specific question. “Update HubSpot” is easy to ignore. “Update your commit and best case categories in HubSpot tonight so we are not doing it live tomorrow” is harder to ignore because it tells you exactly what to do and why it matters right now.

    Async standup

    Fires every morning. Prompts the team to post in thread.

    /remind #sales-team :sunrise: Morning check-in. What's your focus today and is anything blocked? Drop it in thread. every weekday at 9am

    Tell the team to react with :white_check_mark: once they have posted.

    Forecast call prep

    Fires on Friday afternoon before a Monday call. Gives people the weekend to think rather than scrambling on the morning.

    /remind #sales-team :1234: Forecast call Monday morning. Update your commit and best case categories in HubSpot before you finish today so we're not doing it live. every other Friday at 4pm

    Pipeline review day

    A personal reminder for yourself. Fires a couple of hours before the meeting.

    /remind me :clipboard: Pipeline review with [rep name] at 2pm. Pull up their open deals before you go in. in 2 hours

    End of month push

    Fires on the 28th. Three days of runway.

    /remind #sales-team :checkered_flag: Three days left in the month. If it's not in HubSpot it doesn't exist. What needs to move this week? on the 28th of every month at 9am

    Deal gone quiet

    A personal reminder to yourself before something falls off the radar.

    /remind me :warning: Acme deal has been quiet for two weeks. Worth a nudge before the month closes. in 3 days

    The limitations

    • The reminder fires but it does not know if anyone acted on it
    • You cannot edit a channel reminder once it is set, only delete and recreate it
    • You cannot set a reminder for another individual user, only for yourself or a channel. If you want to prompt a specific rep, put it in a channel and mention them.

    Managing your reminders

    Type /remind list in any channel to see everything you have set, with a delete button next to each one. If you have been experimenting, worth doing that now before you end up with seventeen reminders firing at random times and no memory of setting any of them.

  • HubSpot is the record. Slack is the pulse.

    HubSpot is the record. Slack is the pulse.

    Most sales teams treat HubSpot and Slack as two separate things. You log stuff in HubSpot. You chat in Slack. The two worlds don’t really talk to each other, and that’s just how it is.

    That’s the problem.

    HubSpot is the record. It tells you what happened: what deals are open, what stage they’re at, what was said in the last call, what the close date is supposed to be. It’s accurate (when people update it), it’s structured, and it’s permanent. It’s where the data lives.

    Slack is the pulse. It’s where the team actually lives. It’s where you notice that someone who’s usually first to respond to anything hasn’t said a word since Monday. It’s where someone asks if anyone has dealt with a procurement team like this before. It’s where a win lands in a way that actually feels like a win, not just a field update in a CRM nobody checks in real time.

    One tells you what happened. The other is how you find out what’s actually going on.

    The teams that get this right connect the two intentionally. The right HubSpot data shows up in the right Slack channels, as useful signals. A pipeline review starts and the manager already knows where things stand. A forecast call opens with everyone already looking at the same numbers.

    The teams that don’t are winging it in pipeline reviews or opening a dashboard while the rep runs down the clock about the great demo they just did. Or spending the first ten minutes of a forecast call going round the room getting everyone’s commit before discussing anything useful.

    It’s one of those things that just becomes the cost of doing business, so familiar you stop noticing it. But if you step back and look at what it’s actually doing to your team, it’s probably bigger than you think.

  • Your wins channel is producing noise, not recognition

    Your wins channel is producing noise, not recognition

    There’s a channel on your Slack called something like #wins or #closed-deals or #revenue. Someone set it up with good intentions. A deal closes, a notification fires, the team sees it. Simple.

    Except it isn’t working. You know it isn’t working because the channel gets ignored. Because when something genuinely big lands, it disappears into the same feed as everything else. Because you’ve watched a rep close the biggest deal of their career and get three emoji reactions before the conversation moved on.

    The problem isn’t that people don’t care. The problem is that your wins channel treats every deal the same — and when everything gets the same signal, the signal stops meaning anything.

    A notification is not recognition. This is the thing most teams miss when they set up a wins channel. They’ve solved the information problem — the team knows a deal closed — but they haven’t touched the recognition problem at all. They’ve just created a feed.

    Recognition requires weight. It requires the moment to feel different from the one before it. A €500 renewal closing is information. A €50,000 new logo closing is an event. If your Slack channel pings identically for both, you haven’t created a wins culture. You’ve created a ticker.

    The rep who just closed the big one knows exactly how that close landed in Slack. They remember. It either felt like something, or it didn’t. And if it didn’t, that’s not a small thing — it’s a signal about whether this team actually sees what people do.

    The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require a decision most teams never make: what actually counts as a win worth calling out, and at what level?

    This means setting thresholds. Not arbitrary ones — thresholds that reflect what’s genuinely hard to close on your team, what represents real progress, what the team would actually want to celebrate. A five-rep SaaS team scaling from €50k to €500k ARR has different thresholds than a team running high-volume transactional deals. Both can have a wins channel that works. Neither will by accident.

    Thresholds also solve a second problem: they stop the channel from becoming a compliance exercise. When everything posts automatically, nobody feels like they chose to celebrate anything. The wins channel becomes maintenance rather than meaning. When there’s a threshold — when something has to actually earn its place there — the posts that do land carry more weight.

    There’s a related question most teams also skip: who needs to see what, and in what form?

    A team-wide channel makes sense for deals above a certain size, or for new logos, or for anything that represents a genuine milestone. But the rep’s manager probably wants to know about every close. The CEO might want a weekly summary rather than a real-time feed. Finance has different needs again. Most teams end up with one channel trying to do all of these jobs, and doing none of them well.

    The notification that reaches everyone should be the exception, not the default. The exception is what makes it feel like something.

    None of this requires a complex Slack setup or a new tool. It requires someone — probably you — sitting down for thirty minutes and making a few deliberate decisions. What’s a win? What size warrants a team-wide callout? What does that callout actually say — is it just a deal name and a number, or does it include something human, something that tells the story of the close?

    That last part matters more than most managers think. A message that says “Deal closed: Acme Corp, €45k” is information. A message that says “Emmet just closed Acme Corp at €45k — six-month cycle, three competitors in the mix, closed on a Friday afternoon call. Huge one.” is recognition. The difference is thirty seconds and the decision to treat it like it matters.

    Recognition that feels real doesn’t happen automatically. It happens because someone decided it was worth doing properly.

    The wins channel is a small thing. But the small things are usually where you can see whether a team’s culture is intentional or just running on default. Most teams are running on default. The channel exists, the notifications fire, and everyone quietly knows it isn’t quite working — without ever stopping to ask why, or what it would take to fix it.

    It wouldn’t take much.

  • Slack kit for sales managers

    Slack kit for sales managers

    Sales Team Slack Kit
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    Sales Team Slack Kit

    Ready-to-paste Slack messages for sales managers. Pick a template, fill in the details, copy into Slack. No install needed.

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