A Deep Dive into Tableau Dashboard Starters for Salesforce

The 2018 release of Tableau Online includes Dashboard Starters — pre-built dashboards for use with Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua and ServiceNow ITSM.

In this on-demand webinar, our Salesforce and Tableau experts do a deep dive into the Dashboard Starters for Salesforce. You’ll get an understanding of how to turn the Starters into the finished products that decision makers really need.

Topics include

  • How to refine the Starters to get them to work with your Salesforce data, including your custom fields
  • How to determine which components of the Starters are relevant to the way your organization uses Salesforce
  • Whether to modify or rebuild the Starters to include the functionality most important to your decision makers
  • How to incorporate key metrics not available in the base Salesforce tables
  • How to address exceptionally long data refresh times when modifying the Starters
  • How to acquire dashboard starters if you are not using Tableau Online

Presenters

Greg Herrera
President and Co-Founder
Senturus, Inc.

Greg co-founded Senturus in 2001. He has been helping clients implement Salesforce analytic solutions since 2003, Marketo analytics since 2011 and Tableau visualizations and dashboards since 2014.

Monica Van Loon
Solutions Architect
Senturus, Inc.

Monica is a Tableau-certified consultant and trainer and has been delivering  Tableau-based solutions for Senturus clients for over two years.

Presentation outline

  • Tableau’s Dashboard Starters
    • Functional overview of the dashboard
    • Starters for Salesforce data
    • Open pipeline
    • Account tracking
    • Marketing leads
    • Opportunity overview
    • Quarterly sales result
    • Opportunity tracking
    • Top accounts
  • What’s missing?
    • Revenue attribution
    • Sales bandwidth optimization
    • Forecast accuracy
    • Pipeline growth
    • Campaign effectiveness
  • Which marketing campaigns are the best revenue drivers?
  • Account prioritization based on behavior
  • How much of our pipeline do we win?
  • What’s the trend in each component of pipeline growth?
  • Are we gaining new prospects or recycling?
  • Tableau and Salesforce overview
    • How to surface Salesforce data in Tableau
    • Downloading Salesforce Dashboard Starters
    • Helpful information about the Starters
  • Methods to Surface Salesforce Data in Tableau
    • Manually extract data from Salesforce into flat files, pull into Tableau
    • Use Tableau’s direct connections to Salesforce Cloud
    • Connect Tableau to a replica database of Salesforce data that you control
    • Connect Tableau to an integrated database that you control
  • Overview – Tableau’s Dashboard Starters what you need to know
    • By default, Salesforce Dashboard Starters use Tableau’s direct connection to Salesforce cloud
    • Dashboard Starters are available with the Creator license in Tableau Online or you can download them
    • The data is not real-time, Dashboard Starters work off of Tableau extracts
    • Modify the Dashboard Starters to include selections of your custom fields
    • Dashboard Starters can be modified to work with a local replica of your Salesforce database
      • This is required to address the missing capabilities
  • Demo 1: open pipeline – Dashboard Starter
    • How to avoid gotchas and make it work with your Salesforce Cloud data
  • How to get a Salesforce reporting database
    • Many important analytical capabilities are not available when connecting Tableau directly to the Salesforce Cloud
    • The primary limitation is that the Salesforce Cloud data is organized to robustly support a CRM application – it is not organized for analytics
    • Pulling the Salesforce Cloud data into a reporting database creates the foundation required for robust analytics – specifically an enhanced data model that is analysis-ready
    • Senturus has built a solution that includes
    • Pre-built Tableau Dashboards with the Salesforce visibility decision-makers need
    • A tool that replicates Salesforce Cloud data into a reporting database — and keeps it refreshed
    • Pre-built extensions to the database that optimize the data for robust analytics and decision-making
  • Setting up replication: step 1 ID for secure data
  • Setting up replication: step 2 – logon to Salesforce
  • Setting up replication: step 3 – confirm with Salesforce
  • How to make the Dashboard Starters work with an integrated Salesforce reporting database
    • Getting Dashboard Starters to work with a database
      • Create a new Tableau data source using your reporting database (match the joins used in Dashboard Starter)
      • Go to Starter – add that as a New Data Source
      • Replace Data Source
      • Look for Dimensions and Measures with a red !
      • Right click on red dimensions or measures to replace references to the database field names
      • Results
    • Tableau Dashboard Starters – summary
      • Pros
        • They provide a great gallery of visualization capabilities on Salesforce data
        • Salesforce data is pre-joined which makes it easy to create new worksheets
        • They use Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) Dates
        • They have embedded calculated fields that are useful and can be reused
        • They use great features like viz in a tooltip, and URL actions to launch Salesforce screens
      • Cons
        • Many Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are missing
        • They use Tableau’s Salesforce cloud connector technique, which has limitations
        • The UTC Dates will not exactly match Salesforce Cloud reports
        • Performance can be slow, especially when refreshing extracts
        • They are limited to snapshots, trend analysis is very limited
      • Leverage the Tableau Dashboard Starters to quickly build Salesforce visualizations
      • Build on their foundation – add your custom fields and groupings where appropriate
      • Apply the benefits toward a Salesforce reporting database that delivers crucial functionality not available from just the Salesforce Cloud tables
      • Don’t stop at just sales and marketing
      • Customer behavior data exists in several systems including order entry and customer support

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