From "Boilerplate Reporting" to Real Insight: How One Marketing Leader Transformed Data Discovery

“We have so much data to take advantage of—if we're not leveraging it then somebody else is.” These are the words of Sid Wray, a Business Intelligence Product Manager at Cobalt who we recently met.

Sid has an interesting story: He was looking for a tool that could take his team’s analytics to the next level. As he explained, “Cobalt is completely data-driven—and has been for a long, long time.” But their processes for working with data were simply too cumbersome. So while they had terabytes to leverage, it took so long to produce reports that they could only do so every two weeks.

Counting among its clients a majority of US car dealers and manufacturers, Cobalt is a leader in automotive marketing services across the country. So Sid knew they had a real competitive advantage—but needed a tool that could help them move faster.

During our interview, Sid recalled the story of what happened next. “Tableau was pretty obviously a good tool for us to get our data and our insights into the hands of end-users as fast as possible,” he explained. So he downloaded our free trial, and found that Cobalt was able to:

• take just a few hours to automate a report that previously required “hours and hours” of regular work,
• apply Tableau to a variety of needs, from ad optimization to software testing, and
• enhance communication across the organization—now, 65 employees analyze data with Tableau Desktop, and one thousand users view visualizations with Tableau Server.

"Tableau allowed us to move onto more exciting and insightful and powerful opportunities in our data," he said. "It has really helped us move past just the boilerplate reporting and into generating actual insight."

Hear more in Sid's own words—including our second video interview with him—here.