Slack has announced Denise Dresser as its new Chief Executive Officer.
As promised last week following the departure of former CEO Lidiane Jones to the dating platform business Bumble, Salesforce confirmed Dresser's appointment on Monday. Dresser is a long-term Salesforce employee with extensive executive experience.
Dresser commented on LinkedIn:
I am incredibly humbled to share that I will be joining the team at Slack as CEO. Well before Salesforce acquired Slack, I was a fan. Now that I’ve worked in the platform for three years and seen its transformational power, I’m its biggest advocate. It’s truly made work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. I cannot wait to dive in with the team and help even more companies change the way they work with Slack."
Dresser has worked at Salesforce for 12 years and is credited with excelling in leadership roles of growing responsibility while enhancing task-driven, high-performance teams. Salesforce says Dresser has a "passion for product-driven customer success, collaborative leadership and mentoring future women leaders and top talent".
Dresser's record of success most recently encompasses her previous positions as President of Accelerated Industries and EVP of Enterprise Sales before that. Her work in these key roles saw Salesforce drive some of its most critical customer success stories.
" I couldn’t be more excited to share the news that Denise Dresser is our new CEO of Slack," Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said on X: "Denise is an incredible business leader who has excelled at every level in her career at Salesforce(...) Denise is a collaborative technology leader who brings teams together and has inspired me and so many of us with her deep commitment to our values, to our customers and to the spirit of innovation."
Congrats Denise Dresser! @dhdresser our new CEO of @Slack!
Denise is an incredible business leader & champion of Salesforce customer success and innovation who’s deeply committed to our values and our customers.
I couldn’t be more excited to share the news that Denise… pic.twitter.com/ExAwy3cTKi
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) November 13, 2023
As with Jones, the ambition behind Dresser's appointment likely hinges on successfully bridging Salesforce's umbrella of businesses and Slack, which the former acquired for $27.7 billion in November 2020 before integrating Slack’s technology into its Customer 360 CRM suite. Dresser's job description presumably requires maintaining Slack's autonomous focus on innovative collaboration while seamlessly integrating its products and services across Salesforce's portfolio.
"One of the keys to Denise’s success is her passion for products, and I know she shares my admiration for our amazing Slack engineering and product teams who have built the world’s most innovative productivity platform," Benioff added. "With Denise’s leadership, Slack is well positioned to unlock the power of Salesforce with Data+AI+CRM+Trust and make it the place where work happens for more and more of our customers."
