Dreamy Sales Analytics with Tableau and Salesforce (And Where to Find us at Dreamforce)

Why do Tableau and Salesforce go so well together? Salesforce is a great system for managing sales, marketing and service. At Tableau, we’re big Salesforce users. And all that sales, marketing and service activity in Salesforce generates a lot of data.

That’s where Tableau comes in. Tableau can connect directly to Salesforce data and update it automatically on a schedule. Tableau Desktop lets you create sophisticated, interactive analyses with drag-and-drop ease. And you can embed those dashboards right back in Salesforce, both in the browser and Salesforce1. This means you can get data to people where they are doing their work.

Sometimes people ask us, why not just use the built in Salesforce analytics? A couple of reasons.

Because Tableau builds in visual best practices, it’s easier to consume the information. Or to put it another way, if it takes you two hours to review your daily dashboards in Salesforce, it might take an hour in Tableau simply because it’s easier to work through the data.

In fact, we've got great templates that you can hook right up to your own Salesforce data and see how it works.

It’s faster and easier to create dashboards in Tableau than in Salesforce. You've got everything from running totals to forecasting, in a few clicks. these features can be used for any data set, without having to configure hierarchies ahead of time. Quick filters mean you have can get more slices of your data on one dashboard, rather than having to create many.

Tableau also offers the ability to work with Salesforce and non-Salesforce data. For example,

• Blend your sales data with product data to look at product revenue and cost.
• Combine sales data with marketing activity and customer support data to get a 360-degree view of the customer.
• Combine your territory planning with your CRM data to perform what if analysis and evaluate territories by multiple measures.

Tableau has a powerful Data Blending capability that lets you reach out to multiple sources of data and blend them on the fly. No work requests and no data warehouses needed. You just go.

So when we talk to Salesforce users about data blending, we tell them it’s important because Salesforce data is valuable, but it’s not the only useful data out there.

We’ll be at Dreamforce next week! Find our Data Rockstars at expo booth N2112. There are also three sessions to put on your agenda:

• Monday, October 13 at 2 pm: Introduction to Force.com Canvas Apps. Mascone Center West - 2008
• Tuesday, October 14 at 11:30 AM: Put Analytics in the Flow of Business & Increase Productivity with Tableau. Century Theaters - Theater 7
• Thursday, October 15 12:00 PM. A Developer's Guide to Heroku Connect. Mascone Center West – Developer Theater

See you there. It'll be dreamy!