Tap the Vein of Your Mountain of Data with Tableau

In the 170 or so years since the California Gold Rush, the region has undergone tremendous changes. However, there are still a few commonalities. 

Back then, prospectors would stake out a piece of land, say a mountain. But, even if they knew the mountain had a vein of gold inside, they still needed the proper tools, knowledge and skill to mine it. With the boom in tech companies located in Silicon Valley, that mountain is now a mountain of data. The gold vein is making use of that data in a way that drives profits.

Instead of pickaxes, spades and mining pans, nowadays companies use software. Integrating Tableau with Salesforce can help you mine that gold vein in your mountain of data.   

Prospecting

Tableau is an analytics platform that renders data visually. Not only can Tableau gather information from just about any source, it can slice that data in almost any way imaginable. Doing so allows you to digest it in a more meaningful way, empowering you to make better business decisions in a fraction of the time.

In essence, analytics gather all the information you have about customers and organizes it in a single place. That dashboard then allows you to see relevant data rendered visually in almost any way you choose — be it a pie chart, line graph, bubbles or color-coded maps.

For example, let’s say you own an online retail store that sells classic movie posters. You want to know which states in the midwest have the worst sales. With just a few clicks you can isolate the midwest states then color-code them by sales. By just hovering over the state with the highest sales, you could also see what city in that state is performing worst or best.

While this insight is useful in its own right, the benefit doesn’t stop there. Presumably, your business wants to improve. By using an analytics software like Tableau, you can also get the best actions to improve on your weak areas. Perhaps sending specific marketing material sooner than usual to certain demographics of customers helps shore up weak conversion rates, for instance.

These prescriptions make it easy for you to understand how best to improve weak areas or bolster already strong ones, because they tease out what actions are necessary to achieve your desired result. 

Striking Gold

Salesforce users may notice that Tableau is quite similar to Customer Relations Management Analytics (CRMA). That assessment is spot-on. While the two pieces of software perform many of the same tasks, there are some key differences.

The biggest difference between the two is that CRM is accessible to Salesforce users. But maybe there are people in your company that do not spend most of their time in Salesforce. This is where Tableau is useful, because anyone can use it, regardless whether they have a Salesforce login. 

If an employee is an analyst and not a marketer, they can craft data queries aggregated in Tableau to see almost any result they want, all within their browser. Further, you can set up securities within Tableau so that your employees only see what is relevant to them, avoiding the need to wade through copious amounts of information outside their expertise.

Some industries can even leverage Tableau to work for them beyond the data it provides. By setting permissions to an individual customer — let’s say a bank customer — you can offer certain customers the same visualizations your company uses to drive profits. While these insights are individualized to a single customer, you can offer the service to customers for a fee without any additional effort.   

Lay of the Land

In the days of gold prospecting, the first step was knowing where the gold is located. Back then, having someone who knew the land was key, someone who knew the telltale signs of which geographic locations had gold embedded in them. 

With Tableau, the user could be anyone because it can connect to any data, combining data sources. This helps everyone, providing a vast degree of flexibility, giving Salesforce users access to data in Salesforce, offering visual representations of data on mobile devices or embedding them into a website. 

Today’s equivalent of such a guide is an experienced partner. A partner can assist in setting up connectors that may not be native to ensure you are drawing from the data sources most relevant to your company. Further, a partner has the highly technical skills to configure drivers and set network rules and permissions, providing the necessary authentication required to protect your data.

So, tap into that mountain of data. Find that vein of gold and start pulling the wealth of insights from it. Get Tableau.