CRM Data & Tableau: The 360 Degree Dashboard View

Wade Tibke, Marketing Systems Manager, is another one of the youthful, brilliant, energetic team members at Tableau. Having watched the sales team interact with their CRM system, SalesForce.com, he knew life could be better using Tableau and he’s very open about how they use it.

Creating a Tableau application they affectionately call ALPO, they now have instant, easy dashboard access to prospect and account information. ALPO stands for activities, leads, products, and opportunities. It also pays homage to the idea of "eating your own dogfood", i.e. using your own product. Cute, eh?

With points assigned to leads and customers based on actions like downloading a white paper or attending a webinar, the sales team now has a business dashboard to quickly see which prospects are “hot.” By filtering on account rep, each rep can track and manage their own leads. They can then drill down on a particular account to see what type of activity they have had over a timeline. ALPO also tracks customer support cases which can be seen by type, level, status, and other fields.

Opportunity data is very valuable. Looking at opportunity history graphed over time, you can see what is in the pipeline (potential sales) including quotes, purchase decisions. This information helps the sales team set and manage quotas.

They also have a traffic dashboard in ALPO that uses Google Analytics to better understand leads from the website. The dashboard tracks a number of key web metrics and he admits Google’s changing algorithms makes it a challenge to keep the metrics accurate.

In addition, there is a Lead Dashboard that tracks where they come from, volume over time, and more. The dashboard is interactive and each graphed bar can be drilled to detail. There is also a campaign view linked by the timeline so that they can relate the lead volume to any campaigns they are running.

Wade makes a point to say it’s not only CRM data. They have added development team data, product data, and other information internal to Tableau. A classic case of a company that eats its own dog food (so to speak!).