How To Use Slack | Features You Aren’t Using (But Need To Be)

my goal is that by the end of this video you will not only know how to set up and use slack if you haven't already but you will become an absolute slack master knowing how to use certain automations and features that 99 of slack users don't know how to use and how to leverage it to run your entire company from your phone just like i do slack is a channel based messaging platform that allows users to work together more effectively connect all their software tools and services and easily find the information they need to do their best work what that means is slack is your one-stop shop to get rid of email communicate with your team manage your clients and run your company what's going on everyone i'm ravi abubala founder of scaling with systems and i use slack inside of both of my companies in order to manage over 35 employees as well as keep updated on customer payments booked appointments new leads client onboarding and so much more not only that but i've taught over 800 entrepreneurs how to leverage slack and how they can run their entire business from it during the setup phase of this video i will be creating a slack account from scratch so you can see how you can set it up most optimally for success however when we come to the more advanced part of this video training i'm going to show you inside of my slack account for the first time live and show you how we use it to run all of our companies and manage all of our team members whether you're currently communicating with your team members through outdated methods like email or you think that you're a slack pro i guarantee you that there is something in this video for everyone as usual if you get any value out of this video whatsoever do me a quick favor and just smash that like button it takes .001 seconds and make sure you subscribe to the channel so you can get notified when my next video drops with that being said let's dive right into your most comprehensive guide to using slack all right guys so now i am over here at slack.com and i'm just going to go ahead and assume that most people watching this video right now actually don't already have slack set up if you do just give me a few seconds here i'm going to show them how to set this up and then we're going to dive into the really good stuff like optimizing it setting up automations how to run your company from it but as i said you can see we're at slack.com here if this is your first time setting up there's going to be your page going to look similar to this and there's going to be a button probably really similar to try for free so we're going to click that and then obviously two options here continue with google or enter your work email in here and then if you do have a company workspace already you can just click on that and you will actually be able to um sign in with your company email and it should move you straight into the new company workspace but i'm going to say here that i'm actually starting this company up for the first time and we're just going to use one of my email accounts that's i will have this set up perfect we're going to click continue and then they're sending a code to my email so i'm going to really quickly open up my email slack confirmation okay great and after you entered it in here you're going to say create a new slack workspace and so that's what we're going to want to do um obviously you can see i have one of my companies right down below but we're going to create a new workspace you can uncheck that if you don't want them to continuously send you emails so let's click create a workspace so what's the name of your company or team you can name it anything you really want for your company my advertising agency is called prospect social so i can name it that but you can also name it you know reviews team or my other one's called scaling with systems or another really great one is subscribe [Music] now okay okay so let's just call it that uh and then we'll say let anyone with a prospect social email join this workspace so that just means that if you set up a new prospect social email just like i showed you before when you said sign into an existing workspace they'd be able to easily do that so i actually don't like to keep that on just because i don't want somebody you know if i have them as a contractor and i don't necessarily want them inside of there whatever it is i'd rather just invite them which i'm going to show you how to do that later so i'm going to click next here um what's your team working right now so in this step this is going to be setting up essentially um starting to set up your channels so this is going to be what we're kind of communicating with inside of slack so it could be something like sales um could be something like marketing [Music] could be something like advertising client fulfillment etc cetera and i don't know how to spell so we're going to quickly change that perfect next uh what do who do you email most about client fulfillment so they're kind of walking you through the channels aspect over here so i could just say i want to email my friend mel jane at prospect social.com one of my team members i could add as many people as one or if i just want to do a company-wide blast i could get a shareable link copy it to my email and just send that link to everybody right there okay so let's click add teammates awesome and then they're gonna do a quick little walkthrough for you uh really here so this is essentially the rundown of what slackit so this is inside of the slack dashboard as you can see right here this is the company name obviously subscribe now if you haven't already uh underneath that as well you can see what our channels are now channels are essentially just the little imagine them as little pockets or conversations that you can have with your team members i'm going to show you how valuable that is when you have as many team members as many channels as i do but it's so that you don't lose a conversation an email imagine this you're having a conversation with an employee or a contractor or a client over email and then they also call you and then they also text you and they send you a message on facebook and a message on instagram and all of a sudden you don't really know where that piece of information was that they had given to you and it gets really easy to kind of get lost with all of that well the nice thing about channels is you keep all of the conversations about that specific topic in that channel so everything client fulfillment would be inside of here so i'd be like hey you know did we get this client set up on time and i could put that inside of there and then you know someone else would come back one of my team members could say yes you know and then they they could send that to me and then later on if that client wasn't set up i'd be able to come back inside of the client fulfillment channel and say hey james sarah bob bill you know you said that they were set up why is it not set up right so it's a really great way to keep everyone accountable it's a really great way to um to kind of have a almost an archive of every conversation you've had organized which we're going to get into in a second so those are essentially what channels are they kind of come with a few uh ones i i usually honestly kind of get rid of the ones that i don't want which you can come here and click more and you either leave or if you're the the founder of the channel additional options and i don't ever delete channels i just archive them because deleting you can never get back archiving you can um you can still be able to see the past messages inside of there okay so uh really quickly like i said client fulfillment this is my little avatar if i wanted to i could click edit profile here and i can change my name to ravi abubala i can upload an image of something that is maybe a little bit more flattering than this purple person right here i can add my phone number or anything else i want to do so let's and you can see that updates that right there in addition to that you can see inside the channel this is a little box that you can send messages to people you can type hey everyone and then you could just like kind of some of the social media channels when you click at you can start tagging specific people in there so this is mel jane the person i i um i added in here earlier or you can say something like at channel and it will notify everybody inside that channel okay other cool little things bold italic you know strikethrough you have coding if you want to add that aspect in here as well you can add links bullets everything you can imagine pretty much is inside of your emojis you can attach large files you even have gifs in here and you can add different apps as well which we'll get into kind of a little bit later okay so that's essentially how you use the bottom browser here some of the cool things i like to do personally is like something like you know people don't really know this actually right off the bat here but you can click slash and you can click remind and then you can set a reminder for yourself so remind me in four days to check back in on you know client a okay and then in four days it will give me a reminder to check back in on client a or the other thing is slash remind you know mel jane one of my team members to check the application status of clients b right um oh i didn't get that right you see sometimes oh check that in four days there we go and so you can see all your reminders right there so that's some cool stuff you can kind of do inside of slack and i'll show you some other really really cool stuff when we get inside mine which has all the bells and whistles in it on the right hand side here this is when i go up and click info about the channel so inside of a channel here i can call people inside of the channel and then people can hop in which is actually pretty cool add people find certain keywords inside of here so let's type in the word clients oh do we get that client set up on time maybe i type in clients you know b oh client a there you do we get this client set up on time so you can kind of see how that's used inside of here you can set an about if you want to and edit the description i don't usually do that you see the members inside of it you can pin post add files et cetera et cetera as i showed you earlier you know some of the things i do because you know i have a team of 20 plus people i'll mute some channels because i need access to the channel but i don't want to keep on getting notified of it all the time i can jump to a specific date where a conversation happen uh you know you can add apps copy the channel name rename the channel and then the final few things is just like i said earlier archiving this channel you can change it to a private channel which i actually do for some things if it's you know i don't want everyone in the company to have access to it like expenses or receipts or you know it could be employee reviews and i don't want everybody to be able to see that and then like i said delete or archive is going to be in here as well and then the final thing that you can do the channel is leave the channel so you can leave it and that way other people still have access to it however you're not gonna have you're not gonna essentially need access to it anymore okay so underneath channels the final thing with channels as well is that you can just click add channels right here create a new channel and you can add let's just say you know advertising okay and then you click create and you can add you know all the members or you can add specific people let's just say i want to add mel jane back inside of here again we click add okay so now we're in advertising and then you could add multiple channels another little kind of hack once you get a bunch of channels which i'll show you later on is to add like a specific thing in front of it so maybe sales and then it could be um you know sales qualifying call and then you could create one that was like at all members create a new channel sales demonstration call so if you add this little the words at the beginning of it here like sales it'll keep these things uh together so that they're all organized on this dashboard together as well as the client fulfillment let's say i wanted to add a new one and it could be something like client complaints and that will that will keep all these things kind of together here okay so let's just clean this up let's get rid of the random one because i don't think we have any really need for that yes i want to archive it um and we'll keep the advertising one there and then you can so you guys are starting to understand how this will work and it becomes real magic as i show you some of the other stuff if we come down here to direct messages um these are the conversations that you can have with other teammates directly i try not to have too many conversations inside of here because it's not i want everybody to be able to see it with a full transparency company and i like to keep things like i said organized inside of these channels or there's really no point of this thing in the first place okay so uh you can message something over here like you know something personal like hey happy birthday um or whatever you wanted to send over there but realistically you should keep things as much as you can inside of these channels up top now probably for one of my favorite features of slack is the search bar right here i had referenced it earlier but i want to make sure you guys really understand the power of this because this is one of the main reasons why you get off email and you get start using slack is because you can start having anything you can i'll show you when i get into my slack channel but you can say stuff like a client's name and see all the information about that client's name you can say yourself like an employee's name and see all the information about an employee's main you can say stuff like facebook ads or google ad and see all the conversations that have been had you know if you typed in a leads name you could see if you had it set up correctly every single interaction they've had with your business so when they opted in when they submitted an application when they had their sales call when they had their proposal sent out all that stuff so you can kind of document someone's journey from a to z all inside of slack so that's the really cool thing about the search bar in here i would argue it is the most powerful the feature of slack and i would recommend everybody here use it and the final thing about slack is just if you click the channel name up here you can see subscribe now and what you can do is invite people right here you click invite people you can add their name or you can just send an invite link and then send it out to people that's if you want to add additional team members you can create channels here if you go to preferences i'm not going to go too deep in here because obviously you can just decide what you want preferences to be but you know you can also say if you want notifications on slack or not which i think is really important so that you don't have uh you know people blowing you up at 11 o'clock at night 12 o'clock at night except especially if you're like us and you have team members in multiple time zones as well um and let's get back over here and then the final few things is settings and administration workplace settings inside of here you can go really deep in this slack has some great training on that i'm not going to get into too much on that you can customize manage the members kick out members if you need to change their you know change their features you know change them from the primary owner to something else change them to admins et cetera et cetera and um the there's an analytics tab inside of here which you can kind of see how many messages you've sent what files are stored apps and integrations active members all this kind of stuff so i i'm not really inside of here too much but it could be something interesting if you're if you want that kind of information and the final thing is going to be the pricing that i want to cover for just the beginners in this video and that is going to be choose the plan that's right for your team so when you get i think 10 000 searchable um messages inside slack so that's really really valuable but the downside of that is at some point you will not be able to find information anymore because it's going to be too far in the past so you think 10 000 messages a lot but if you're doing any kind of the work that i'm about to show you then it's going to be a lot less than you think and you're going to need to upgrade as soon as possible so i do recommend it as soon as you can there's a standard version here and there's a plus version here you can kind of decide most people will be able to use the free one uh with ten thousand search messages ten apps and one on one video calls for a good bit of time and then i'll be honest with you with a 20 plus person team we still use um the standard package here so the plus is for those that are seeking like administration tools and some larger company setups or the enterprise gold but i'd say about for 95 percent of people that are watching this video right now you should just be able to use the standard package okay so with that all being said i'm going to pull up my slack inside of here now and show you guys what it looks like and how we've set it up for success inside of my company all right guys so like i said we are inside of our slack channel now inside of my company scaling with systems one of the companies i have as you can see we have about 24 members up there up top and i'm going to show you how we leverage slack or how i personally leverage slack to run this company day in day out so obviously this is the general channel here you can see we have people that post at the end of every single day the things that they did i'll probably blur some of this stuff out here just uh you know to keep the privacy of my employees but you can see that they comment the things that they did every single day so i'm able to review are they being efficient or not i'm going to really quickly start at the top and go down and show you some few cool ones that we kind of leverage one of the first ones channels that we use that we really love is called booked appointments so this is something i teach all of this for my clients inside of scaling with systems i set this all up for them but so booked appointments is how we can actually see as you can see in here whenever someone books on our sales teams calendar we can see where they came from we can see what ad they were watching what targeting they had you know who referred them over if someone did and that way i kind of get a general idea of what the flow of new appointments are like inside of our company and you can set that up with a integration using an app called zapier z api er i will actually link the card up top here of a video i have showing how to do this already so i would just right click that open that up in a new video but don't leave this one because we're not done yet so we actually also on top of that attach in their application for their booked appointments as well so you can see inside of here i can we can be able to tell right from the back what are the quality appointments from this lead source you know what is his appointment looking like should be we be working with them should we not be et cetera et cetera okay so that's all inside of the book deployment channel gives me a good flow of things that are coming in and out of the company same thing with book disco so these are for our discovery calls uh for our sales team so we book discovery calls of people every single day dozens and dozens of discovery calls and exact same thing right we have numbers we have uh you know in information on the person we have applications of all that kind of stuff now a few other things that i recommend people having inside of theirs i have an email channel here once again we'll blur some of this stuff out but you can see inside of here i am having my assistant selena she drops in some of the most important emails that i only be checking every single day so i think that if you're a business owner you should not be checking email i really i tell my clients at inside scaling with systems i really think it's kind of a waste of time and it's a good way to ruin your day to be honest with you so easily delegatable so i'd recommend you do delegate that out to a virtual assistant like we teach our clients at scaling systems or somebody else and then what they can do is if somebody is wanting to reach you or it's in a more important email they can drop it inside of slack and that way you can just respond inside of here but the cool thing is i've taught selena well and so she pretty much filters 99 of the stuff and then only the really important stuff do we keep inside of the channel here she drops inside the channel so a few other channels i think are important so we have a appointment setter channel inside of here so whenever our appointment setter he is confirming appointments the morning of he's a virtual assistant then they can actually go inside of here and say hey did they confirm do they not confirm so my sales team knows should they be showing up for this call or should we cancel this appointment beforehand okay uh another kind of cool thing i won't click on these channels because they're pretty private but um you can actually connect other outside members uh outside channels inside of here so if we go down here and we click create a channel what we can do is actually click this share outside of scaling with systems and then what we can do is actually share the channel with outside companies or outside contractors so they can stay inside of their slack i stay in my inside of my slack and it's very very organized okay so i do have that with a few of our advertising media buyers as you can see inside of here and then when we come down two of my other favorite channels that i have are called payment failed once again this will be blurred out but we use that software called zapier i'd reference earlier to send in a notification anytime one of our clients has a payment that fails so it says hey this client this email failed their this amount of payments please reach out or they're going to lose access to the program right and then we have a list a google documents list of everyone that's delinquents and this allows my customer success manager allows our sales people allows everybody to know hey is this person late why are they late we need to jump back in figure something out and get them back on track for their payments and then same thing for payment success so as you can see in here as well we had a payment come through today this will also be blurred out but we had a payment come in today and so this will all also let me know without having to sign in to anywhere else because remember that is the goal i don't want to have to sign it anywhere else i can see how much money is coming into my company what's the cash flow coming in every single day all right we also have a sales team channel down here as well so this is just the conversation that my team's having with our you know our sales teams having with other members in here as you can see we've got 18 people in this channel right now um and we're able to talk about you know sales tactics strategies you know feedback that kind of stuff and then we have each of our individual teams or our sales team leaders down here you can see that as well and oh we shot a payment success a second ago look at that and so i can click on here oh there we go so you can see literally someone just paid their 2000 payment two seconds ago so that's how easy it is for me to keep track of the payments inside of our company now if we come down here you can kind of get an idea of some of the other ones i'm not going to break down every single channel inside of here but i hope inside of your mind some of this automation some of this stuff is starting to click on some of the valuable things you could be having inside of your company okay the final really important one that i like as well is having a zendesk or some kind of customer success management channel where your your account managers your team manager are able to share with you any kind of issues problems feedback that your customers are giving you so you're able to answer really really quickly uh back to them so they can answer their clients really quickly some of these are the muted channels i had talked about below they're actually from um the like some channels that need to be happening inside of our company but i don't want to be notified every single time they are so this is an example of one of the assets we have it's a three steps to scale course really incredible program it's actually in the description down below and whenever someone opts inside of it it comes inside of this channel and then our team reaches out and checks in hey did you enjoy the course did you get everything okay et cetera et cetera so this is also a great way to check out lead flow inside of your company and i keep it muted because i actually don't need to see it and i don't need that notification coming up every single day and the final part that i just want to show you guys really quickly inside of here is you can add some really cool apps like asana and google drive and zapier all inside of here so that in case you have you know like this is my assistant dropping some information about a you know catamaran that we're going on for new year's eve i can literally comment back inside the task right inside of here i can mark and complete i can like it all of that kind of stuff inside of slack once again my goal is to never leave slack okay and then you can add zoom inside of here as well so let's just go to rovala here if i typed in something all i do i have to do is just type in slash zoom and it because i have the zoom app and it will actually start a zoom id a zoom channel right now that everyone can hop right inside of the channel with it's really really valuable really incredible and i recommend everybody at least get the zoom one if you guys lose zoom because we'll just be chatting back and forth and uh we'll be going back and forth with messages and i'll just like hey let's just hop in a quick conversation slash zoom i hit enter and then boom we have a channel for the whole team to hop in in a few seconds and it kind of builds especially in today's day and age with this remote work it kind of builds that camaraderie it builds that ability for you to have a conversation with someone quote unquote face to face rather than sending messages back and forth and the final thing like i showed you guys earlier and i talked about was this search bar here i just want to show you guys something if i came over to you know one of our newest clients that just joined today and i copy his name and i actually put it up here in the search bar what it's going to allow me to do is see uh you know all the conversations that have been involved with his name in there i can see when he paid when he first joined all of that stuff inside of our search channel here so it's really really important that you're able to have this search features only on the paid plan so that's why i would recommend when you guys get up well it's only the pay plan after you hit 10 000 people so when you get up to or 10 000 people 10 000 messages so when you do get up to ten thousand messages i do recommend you guys uh upgrade so that you're able to search because if we go to my analytics tab here i just wanna show you guys really quickly tools analytics let's just look for laughs here what our analytics look like so 123 public channels and then if i come down here and show the messages and files uh and the last 30 days we've had so just the last 30 days alone we've had 11 000 messages from members um and then if i come up here as well and i just change this to all time you can see some really interesting stats inside of here with active members messages sent uh you know 128 000 messages sent inside of our slack channel so you guys think we use this a lot obviously we do so there you have it everyone the most comprehensive slack guide on the internet i know i talk fast i know that was a lot of information i do recommend you guys go back and watch that again or watch a particular instance again and honestly do it right now don't exit out of the video because it's important to ingrain it in your mind before you forget so go back watch that area again and you'll be able to make sure you take action on it immediately if you guys think i delivered if you thought this is one of the most comprehensive guides of slack on the internet if you like some of the stuff i showed you underneath the hood of one of my companies please do me a quick favor click the like button subscribe down below and then comment below that and let me know what part of slack you liked the most or what you wanted to learn a little bit more about and i'll be sure to comment below that or maybe even make a separate video on it if you know someone that's struggling with slack or struggling with a team and needing to set up some automation and having this one-stop shop for communication do them a quick favor and just send them the link to this video so that they can thank you i can thank you and they can learn how to use slack for their company finally guys i'm going to drop down below a totally free facebook group that i host along with a few other incredibly successful seven and eight figure entrepreneurs we do weekly trainings just like this we do live intensive masterminds as well all totally free you don't have to pay a dime so just click the link below if you're looking for more trainings like this you're looking to grow you're looking to scale and you're looking for a community of really hungry entrepreneurs you can find that in the description the box below thanks and i'll see you guys the next video [Music] you

Channel: Ravi Abuvala

Views: 15,661

Keywords: how to use slack, slack tutorial, how to use slack app, how to use slack for business, how to use slack video, how to use slack software, how to use slack with trello, how to use slack chat, slack tips, slack for project management, slack tutorial video, how to use slack 2021, how to use slack for beginners, slack tutorial for beginners, how to use slack mobile app, business communication tool, slack 2021, slack, how to use slack like a pro, ravi abuvala, scaling with systems

Id: Y_wRPk2oKU8

Length: 28min 16sec (1696 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020