Tableau CRM for Salesforce replacing the “Quarterly Performance” default dashboard to bring critical and actionable performance analytics to the first screen I view when I log into Salesforce.
My Beef With Traditional Reporting
As a sales leader, most of my Salesforce requirements revolve around the following principle: I need my CRM to be an excellent output device without requiring much input overhead. This means that I need robust and easy-to-find reports that show me key performance indicators when I need them without having to dig around for them so I can make sense trends and make decisions fast. The issue with standard CRM solutions, and with Salesforce in particular, is that while you get access to robust reports and dashboards out of the box, it’s easy to lose reports in folders unless you forget to “favorite” them. Also, if you embed one of these reports or dashboards on a home screen or record page layout, the data is static and cannot be interacted with or easily exported right from within that screen.
Enter: Tableau CRM
“So you’re telling me that I need to buy another product from Salesforce to build the reports I need?” Not quite. For most of the companies we work with that purchase Tableau CRM, they can gather mostly the same insights leveraging Salesforce reports and dashboards. What’s vastly different though, is the presentation of the data and the ability to manipulate dynamic filters automatically.
By way of example, here’s what a sales rep’s dashboard looks like using standard reports and dashboards:
And here is an example of a dashboard we built with Tableau CRM:
The clear differentiator is how dynamic the datasets are. Notice in the Tableau CRM dashboard when I click on a new sales week, all dashboard components change including products sold, lead sources, and the billing country of the accounts that I have set to close in the fiscal week. In a nutshell, this dynamic assignment of new values based on the user’s interaction with the dashboard is the value proposition of Salesforce Tableau CRM Sales Analytics over standard Reports and Dashboards.
Embedding In Records
Another competitive differentiator for Salesforce Tableau CRM is the level of detail you’re able to interact with directly on record pages in Salesforce. Take, for example, the Tableau CRM Account Summary above. Without leaving the account record, I can see across all related objects and surface information like the average discount amount the account has received across all deals, our average win rate with them, average sales cycle duration, open support cases, and more. This same principle can be applied to opportunity records, lead records, and even custom object records if you own Platform Tableau CRM licenses.
Mobile Capabilities
Another factor that heavily weighs in Tableau CRMs’ favor is its mobile functionality. Salesforce reports and dashboards are visible in the Salesforce Mobile application, but they’re mainly static. With Tableau CRM, your data comes to life and can be easily manipulated and interacted with on the go, as you can see in my mobile demo above. Any Tableau CRM Dashboard can also be exported, notated, and be programmed to set alerts as well. This is one area where there’s truly no contest.
Ability to Ingest Data from External Sources
Tableau CRM is more than a BI tool. As a matter of fact, it has the out of box capability to ingest data from other external sources like your ERP (See our blog post about reporting on NetSuite data with Tableau CRM here), or even a data warehouse. For many clients who choose Tableau CRM, the typical cost of integrating systems together for the purpose of reporting across platforms is offset by implementing an analytics tool that can natively ingest information from multiple systems.
Tying it All Together
Put very simply, if your organization is not sure if Salesforce standard reports and dashboards can meet your reporting requirements, there’s a high probability that it can. However, if mobile-friendly dynamic dashboards that can be surfaced on almost any record in your database is what you’re looking for, let’s talk about how we can help you get up and running with Tableau CRM for Salesforce.
