Anyone using Tableau to aggregate Marketo and Salesforce reporting data?

[Anonymous]

Is anyone using Tableau to aggregate Salesforce and Marketo data in a meaningful way? The goal would be to create executive level reporting on both marketing and sales activities. Would you be willing to share your current use case? Successes? Roadblocks? Pitfalls?

Have seen some folks posting about this topic: ​ :: ​ :: ​

Many thanks!

Levi

[Dory_Viscoglio]

We haven't gone with Tableau at this point because we didn't find a great way to manage the API calls (we didn't try very hard, though). I have had several sit-downs with my Sales Ops/Analytics team who likes to refer to Marketo numbers as "Q&D" (quick n' dirty), but at the end of the meeting we've been able to generate the same numbers out of RCE that we've been able to generate from Tableau.

I'm sure there are some definite benefits that we are missing out on (visualization, primarily), but as far as numbers that our organization can rely on, we are pretty happy with RCE at this point.

Caveat: I have done a LOT of work to make sure we have all of the info that we want in RCE, including hidden formula fields on the opportunity level, and more! Here's one example, that was shared in the Marketo Advocates group for Tip Tuesday:

[Anonymous]

Hey thanks for sharing Dory Viscogliosi​ ! Good to know that it's feasible to get most all reporting needs out of Marketo using RCE. Awesome tip too btw with using hidden fields in SFDC to get richer reporting insights.

[Anonymous]

Levi,

I am a bit late to the party here, but hope this helps. At Senturus, we have integrated our Salesforce and Marketo data and do all our reporting against it using Tableau.  In fact our company President is passionate about it and recorded a webinar:  Unlocking Salesforce and Marketo Value with Tableau https://www.senturus.com/resources/unlocking-salesforce-and-marketo-value-with-tableau/

In the recording, Greg (Senturus President) reviews:

·         Leveraging the existing Tableau connectors for Salesforce and Marketo

·         Adding the ability to measure pipeline growth over time

·         Adding visibility into the components of pipeline growth (new deals, changes in deal size, changes in deal stage)

·         Leveraging the existing integration between Marketo and Salesforce to improve analysis by combining marketing data with sales pipeline data

·         Combining Marketo and Salesforce data into a single database that is optimized for Tableau consumption

·         Adding the ability to measure conversion rates and lead velocity across the entire demand funnel – including both the Marketo and Salesforce portions of the funnel

·         Helping your sales team prioritize leads by enhancing Salesforce with behavior and scoring data

·         Organizing your marketing and sales data for advanced analytics

You can contact Greg via info[at]senturus.com if you have any questions.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Andrea,

·         Leveraging the existing Tableau connectors for Salesforce and Marketo

Ouch The Marketo connector is not appropriate for real live usage. read here: If you use Tableau to analyze your Marketo data, look here

-Greg

[Anonymous]

@Gregoire,

You are right about that.  The webinar content agrees with you that the Tableau Connector to Marketo is not useful for most real-life use-cases.  There are some limited – very limited – cases where the Tableau Connector can be useful, and the webinar recommends that users get started with those limited use-cases while they prepare to implement the datamart approach that you and others endorse in the thread above.

The webinar content definitely agrees with you that the answer is to build a datamart into which you replicate the cloud data from Marketo (and Salesforce) into a relational database – and then have Tableau source from that database.

We are finding that the Marketo BulkAPI seems to provide a better foundation for datamart creation than the regular Marketo APIs that some vendors have used.  Most importantly, it better deals with the limits that Marketo places on daily total API calls. 

We are using the BulkAPI in combination with our own code to load Marketo data into our datamart.  Our developers also wrote code that deals with datamart challenges such as how to handle orphaned Activity History records related to Leads which have been merged.  I will be happy to get you in touch with the development team which has built that code. It’s very useful and will be even more important come August when Marketo implements their new data retention policies.  With the new policies, most of the important history metrics will be held for only 90 days and then deleted, and no history data will be held longer than 25 months.  Regardless of the Tableau Connector debate, the Marketo data retention changes are what will make it imperative for every Marketo customer to have a datamart that retains the full, unpurged activity history data.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Andrea,

You are raising excellent points here. and I fully agree with you regarding the consequences of the new data retention policy.

The big issue being that most of the customers do not have in house developers that can create what you did with the bulk API... We are still waiting for the various ETL to leverage that API rather than(or in parallel with) the "classical" endpoints.

Furthermore, the Bulk API does not cover yet all the data that is needed. Especially, program membership and opportunity data are missing (although you would imagine to get the later from your CRM, rather than from Marketo).

-Greg