Salesforce's efforts to embed Slack into its product portfolio ramped up this week with the general release of Sales Elevate, a new offering that natively integrates Sales Cloud into the popular chat app.

It's the first time Slack has customized its app to the needs of a specific job role, with a dedicated home screen for sales staff available in the sidebar to offer an overview of information from Sales Cloud.

"This is a new way of doing integrations between Salesforce and Slack that's more native to Slack...," said Rob Seaman, Slack's senior vice president for enterprise product. "We're charting a new path for the way we build line of business-specific products at Slack."

The feature is available to Slack Business+ and Enterprise Grid customers with access to Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited Sales Cloud editions. It's priced at$60 per user each month.

There are also plans to create similar features in line with other Salesforce products aimed at marketing and customer support professionals, for instance. No release date for these additional editions has yet been set, Seaman said.

Salesforce acquired Slack two years ago for$27.7 billion, promising that the collaboration app would form the basis of a "digital HQ" to connect workers.

Adapting Slack to sales professionals can help overcome some of the productivity challenges they face by minimizing the need for task switching and enabling "seamless collaboration among sales teams," said Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst at Metrigy.

Business demand for real-time collaboration software to support sales staff is on the rise, said Ra