Analysts: Salesforce customers don't seem to be swayed by the addition of Slack; the messaging service's revenue growth fell from 11.7% in Q1 2022 to 6.9% in Q3
Angus Loten / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Slack entered Salesforce's portfolio as a growth asset: even in late 2020, when its pandemic-era growth had already flattened, it was still expanding revenue 49% YoY standalone. At the time of the deal close, Salesforce's own Q1 FY2022 guidance embedded roughly $500M of Slack revenue for the year, folding it into a 'Platform and Other' line that was still growing 53% as of the March 2022 quarter.
The new analyst read is that the flywheel never spun: Slack's growth rate has more than halved inside Salesforce, from 11.7% in Q1 2022 to 6.9% by Q3, and customers are buying Salesforce suites without Slack being the draw. That lands on a company whose later quarters — a Q1 miss in 2024 that sent CRM down over 20%, and a Q4 FY2025 revenue miss with below-consensus FY2026 guidance — have all been about decelerating organic growth.
First-order effects
- Salesforce faces direct investor scrutiny of the Slack acquisition's payoff: with Slack growing at 6.9% versus the 49% it posted as an independent company, the deal is being scored as a drag on blended growth rather than an accelerant.
- Slack's product and sales teams lose the 'strategic linchpin' narrative — analysts now treat it as a commodity messaging layer customers don't switch vendors to obtain.
Second-order effects
- Salesforce is pushed toward repositioning Slack around new functionality rather than bundle economics — consistent with its testing of an AI-based Slackbot assistant running in AWS Virtual Private Cloud, aimed at giving the product a reason to be bought on its own merits.
- Competing collaboration and productivity vendors gain a talking point against Salesforce suite pitches: the data hands them evidence that attaching Slack to CRM contracts does not move customer purchasing decisions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large SaaS acquisitions get judged on post-close attach-rate and organic-growth contribution rather than announced synergy targets — raising the bar for future collaboration-software megadeals.
- The broader structural risk for Salesforce is that its growth story resets to core CRM deceleration, forcing either margin-led management or further M&A to replace growth that acquisitions like Slack failed to add.
The trend: Enterprise software megadeals are increasingly measured by whether acquired products sustain their pre-deal growth curves, and Slack's deceleration inside Salesforce is a leading data point in that reassessment.