How to get the most out of Salesforce’s default Tableau CRM Dashboards

Soon after Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau in 2019, they released a suite of B2B Dashboards with the intention of helping businesses understand their marketing and sales efforts. With Salesforce documentation being light on the matter when it comes to training, I wanted to share my learnings over the past few months using the Default B2BMA Dashboards (which also go by Tableau CRM Dashboards, or Einstein/Tableau CRM).

So, what is B2BMA?

At its core, it’s a big data engine that brings Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) data and Salesforce data together so that Sales and Marketing’s view of the world tells one fully connected story, so you know how much ROI (return on investment) all your campaigns are truly bringing in a series of 6 simple and easy to use dashboards. Let’s go through them one by one…

Engagement Dashboard

Here’s where all your marketing assets are reported on, looking specifically at email, email templates (used in Engagement Studio and as autoresponders), form and landing page performance within Pardot – so Pardot landing page only, not your website pages with the Pardot Tracking code on it.

The tricky piece to this report is that sometimes the Unique Open rate isn’t hooked up to the Filters correctly when first built. To solve this, ensure the “Apply Global Filters” is ticked in the Query tab for this widget.

Also, Tags are really important here so make sure all your assets are Tagged and there’s some cohesion between campaigns on those tagging naming conventions.​​​​​​

Pipeline

This shows the full customer journey, from Visitor through to Opportunity. This in tandem with the velocity markers underneath can really help you prep for peaks and troughs within your marketing cycle, so your Sales keep steady or increase throughout the year. The Pipeline Dashboard is a good one to work on so that Marketing and Sales can be on the same page during high-level meetings where these figures are necessary to report on.

You can see on this dashboard a breakdown on Opportunities (so what’s Open, Close, Won, Lost, their Source etc.), along with other interesting data points like Visitor Conversion Rate and Opportunity Win Rate. The likes of Visitor Metric will take a few months to stabilise if you’ve recently implemented Pardot (based off the amount of website traffic you receive), so don’t be worried once this starts lowering over a few months.

This report does have a few gremlins that you need to be aware of. The Lead Status’ will inevitably need changing to suit the way your business uses Pardot, and Velocity figures would need to reflect that change too. The easiest way forward on this front is to build a new dashboard altogether because of how the Salesforce dataset is built, but that’s what I’ve learned from my experience – shout out if you’ve figured the ways to resolve this! Ensuring all your Lead Sources are right as well often gets forgotten so keep those tidy where you can.

Marketing Manager

This is showing a top-line summary of the Engagement and Pipeline report so that you can present this to Heads and VPs of Marketing to show campaign effectiveness along with Sales data – giving that Marketing Health report. If any of these figures present you with a question, or you would like to expand the story further, then going to the relevant Pipeline or Engagement Dashboard would be the right action to take here.​​​​

Multi-touch Attribution

This is where the digital marketer in me geeks out – sorry, not sorry!

It looks at your campaigns (altogether or separately) and then apply campaign influence models (built in Salesforce) to be able to really get to grips with the campaigns driving revenue.

A good example of this is PPC. Justifying PPC can be difficult because this is often a starting point in someone’s buying journey. If we don’t have that very first point tagged with the PPC campaign, and if we don’t then credit that campaign with generating that lead – who then went through 5 other campaigns before his/her opportunity closed successfully – then you’ll stay in this vicious cycle trying to justify spend to channels who don’t directly close business. Those indirect channels are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and potentially could result in a massive drop-off in Prospects and Opportunities if the PPC tap were to be shut off. Don’t let this happen! Before building out Campaign Influence Models in Salesforce, you should decide on the right one for you – the default Salesforce Model works on a first-touch attribution basis which is a great starting point if you’re new to attribution reporting.

One last tip is to not forget to input Cost and Budgeted Revenue figures into your campaigns as these are essential to working out ROI and Value which also has a knock-on effect as to how much of those figures your campaigns and channels should receive based off your attribution model.

ABM (Account Based Marketing

This brings together Opportunities, Contacts, Marketing Engagement and Sales activities all together so you can understand how much activity drives the opportunity on an account level. You’ll be able to see how much that account has driven in terms of Pipeline, Open Opportunities, Avg. Engagement Scores etc. But what makes this report so great is the Sales Events. Here you see whether Sales reps take enough time on accounts, or if there’s a correlation between time on account likelihood to close. We can also layer on top of that the Types of Sales as well, like Calls, Face to face meetings, ad hoc meetings etc. You’ll need to be checking in with your Sales team to ensure they’re using Sales Events correctly to get the most out of this section though – it’s worth it though!

Einstein Behaviour Scoring (*Only available with Einstein)

This additional report looks at the factors that Einstein uses when building your scoring model, which is an additional step taken to further the default scoring model based off the behaviours across all Prospects. By getting to grips with the most influential activity and assets you can start to tailor your scoring to be even more bespoke to your prospects, pushing the most engaged people through to Sales.

There’s only been one slight issue I’ve come up against with this report, and that was that data wasn’t feeding in correctly from Pardot. The best way to check this is through the Pardot data flow in the Sandbox.

Whilst these are meant to be default dashboards, the biggest learning I’ve made is that these dashboards are intended for a Data Scientist to do most of the “heavy lifting” changes, but it’s not outside the realm of possibilities for myself to build out the odd dashboard here and there. The default widgets given aren’t always suitable to everyone and making little amends is fine, but where you can build your own from scratch so you can manipulate a dataset that you know well. All the above dashboards can form a base line to find that new reporting story on what you can report and what you want to report and that suits your business’s needs.