Notionizer

Anyone can publish Salesforce charts to Notion, right from Slack.

Video

A simple Slack prompt publishes a report of pipeline data, in Notion, complete with charts, tables, and a presentation mode perfect for a weekly standup.

Video: publishing Notion charts of Salesforce data from Slack

By the way, I know Notionizer is an awful name. I needed a working title.

I needed a working title because I can't share the real thing, which is running my client's Salesforce data inside their Notion and Val Town accounts.

As for the demo, it works with Salesforce's developer sandbox data and runs out of my Notion and Val Town accounts.

Features

It's satisfying to be able to bring rich, accurate detail about a business into the context of a conversation. For many of us, Slack is where most of those conversations happen, or could happen. And as for Notion, to me, Notion is the best good enough workspace and it's perfect for artifacts like these reports.

Screenshot: Slack and Notion, side by side

Some other features that may not be obvious but are worth a beat:

• Ready access: Anyone in the company who can use Slack and who has access to Notion can publish and view Salesforce data.
• Speed: Val Town syncs Salesforce data to Notion in the background, so publishing charts and tables is fast.
• No artifact sprawl: Reports are saved as pages of a Notion database, not strewn around the workspace or marooned in another tool.
• Reusability: Reports are generated from simple Markdown templates, with user- and agent-friendly prompts that render in Notion as charts and tables.
• Presentability: Notion's Present mode (beta) isn't exactly a PPT or Slides killer but it is good enough to run a standup from and it is immediate—you can go from Slack to a Notion report to a data-driven presentation without any pixel pushing or copypasta.

Screenshot: a Notion line chart with a reference line set from Slack

Goals

Time and cost savings are measurable but other goals—no less worthy!—drive this work, too.

Notion charts do a good job of telling the highest-value story. They are not a replacement for tools like Looker or Jupyter data science notebooks but if what you need are clear pictures of data that is otherwise out of reach in tools like those, they're great.

Screenshot: a Notion donut chart and table view of open deals

The time was right — Salesforce had recently gone headless, which made room for a new way of thinking about subscription expenses and access. With the Salesforce data out of Salesforce and synced to Notion, fewer people need seats for Salesforce, and everyone (and everything) can access the data where they work.

To click a button in Slack and publish a report filled with live charts and tables in Notion is fun. But more imoportantly, it's how my client saves ~3 hours every Sunday night preparing for a Monday morning meeting with his team. He used to dig through Salesforce and cut and paste data into Trello that would go stale immediately, and then have to do it again the following week.

With the pipeline data at everyone's finger tips, Slack conversations can be data informed, without delay. We don't need a meeting. There's no need to carve out time to prep the data. We have it, right here:

Screenshot: the /notionizer slash command and prompt that publishes pipeline reports in Notion

Technology

There's a lot more that I can and probably should say about each of these bits; especially Val Town, which is a non-negotiable for me the last few years.

• A Slack slash app
• Notion, Notion's API, and Notion's Javascript SDK, out of the box
• The Salesforce API, for Opportunities and Accounts data
• Val Town syncs Salesforce data to Notion, hosts and secures the API, stores Markdown, and writes everything to Notion
• Val Town's MCP plugin pushes code live ~instantly (no local code!)
• Anthropic's API publishes Markdown prompts as charts and tables in Notion (running Haiku — cheap!)
• I wrote ~all the code with Claude Code (Max)