Bringing external data into Salesforce is easy with Tableau CRM. In fact, Tableau CRM’s input connectors can access and replicate data from data warehouses, databases, and external applications. In this post, I’ll show you how to configure a connection to three data warehouses: Snowflake, BigQuery, and Azure Synapse. But first, let’s consider why you’d move your data from a warehouse into Salesforce in the first place.
Why Is This Important?
It’s likely that your customer-facing teams spend the majority of their time in Salesforce. Why make them search for insights in separate systems when Tableau CRM can deliver analytics to them directly in Salesforce? By choosing the latter option, you’re enabling your customer-facing teams to make faster and smarter decisions.
Let’s look at an example using a fictitious company, Vandelay Industries. Vandelay Industries, a latex manufacturer, is experiencing churn from their existing accounts. To forecast churn, their analytics team built a model to predict the likelihood of churn for each of their accounts and stored it in their data warehouse. As an attempt to combat churn, the sales team would like to offer a discount to the accounts most likely to churn. George, a latex salesman, suggests using Tableau CRM to bring the predictions into Salesforce rather than connecting a BI tool to their data warehouse. This way, he doesn’t need to leave Salesforce to access the data. To make the data actionable, he suggests embedding a dashboard within the Accounts page to help the sales team prioritize their workload. Additionally, he creates a custom field on the Account object to store the predictions for each individual account.Â
Thanks to George, Vandelay Industries decides to position their analytics within Salesforce. To integrate the data sources, George can connect Tableau CRM to their data warehouse using the information in the next section.
Connecting To Your Data Warehouse
The rest of the blog post will show you how to configure a connection to Snowflake, BigQuery, and Azure Synapse.
Snowflake Connector
Google BigQuery Connector
Azure Synapse Connector (Formerly Azure SQL Data Warehouse)
Now What?
What do you do now that your data warehouse is connected to Tableau CRM? Here are some potential use cases:
- Enrich your Salesforce data with first or third party information in your data warehouse
- Explore external data on it’s own, or combine with Salesforce data using Tableau CRM’s data preparation tools
- Build and embed visualizations throughout your Salesforce environment
- Load external or combined data into Einstein Discovery for descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive insights
- Insert external data into custom objects/fields and keep up to date by scheduling data refreshes
Closing Thoughts
Where you distribute your analytics matters, and Tableau CRM makes it possible to deliver insights directly in Salesforce without needing to build complicated integrations.Â
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