Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Demby, Director of Solution Engineering at Tableau. Join us as we chat about Tableau Pulse, Tableau Einstein, and how easy it is to get started.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Demby.
John leads a team of demo engineers for Tableau. What that means is they get their hands on all the new solutions and products ahead of time, and use them to make cool things. And two of the coolest, newest things out there are Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein.
Tableau Einstein takes all of the goodness of Tableau, the powerful features of Data Cloud, a new semantic layer called Tableau Semantics, and brings that into Salesforce. There’s also a Tableau Agent, allowing you to open up the power of business intelligence and analytics to everyone on your team through Agentforce.
“We started thinking about how people consume data,” John says, “and I think it’s changed.” People want to consume data within the flow of their work. They don’t want to have to go looking around for things, or sift through multiple dashboards to figure out what information is relevant.
That’s where Tableau Pulse comes in. It provides contextual, relevant insights from your data directly into Salesforce. With a simple KPI scorecard, you and your users can see what metrics are up, what metrics are down, and get insights about the next steps you should take.
The scorecards Tableau Pulse provides are just the beginning because you can also ask it questions. Pulse is AI-infused, meaning you can ask plain language questions to generate specific insights about your data. It’s also built for collaboration, so it’s easy to take these insights and start a conversation with anyone else in your organization.
Getting Tableau Pulse is as easy as installing a managed package in your Salesforce instance. “We’ve made it really for a Salesforce Admin to set this up with little to no Tableau experience,” John says. There are nine premade dashboards to get you started, and it’s easy to customize things to get something that works for you.
John shares a lot more great stuff about Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’ve got the much loved John Demby, our resident Tableau guru, here to talk about some of the really super cool things that Tableau has come out with, specifically Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. Now, you may remember John and his team create these amazing demos that really show all of the possibilities of Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. And boy, we get into it, about how we’re driving insights with AI, and of course we talk about why pie charts are so out. This is really a fun episode. Now before we get started just a quick reminder, if you want to hit that follow button, that way whatever podcast app you’re listening to, every Thursday a new episode will be downloaded right to your phone. So with that, let’s talk Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein and get John on the podcast. John, welcome to the podcast.
John Demby:
Hey Mike, it’s great to be back.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know, it’s been a while. So what have you been up to? What do you do at Salesforce, for the people that haven’t run into you at our many events?
John Demby:
Well, I have I think today the coolest job in the world. I work in our pre-sales organization in solution engineering but what I do is, I lead a team of demo engineers. You might go, demo engineers, why is that really cool? Well, we get our hands on the solutions and the products ahead of our customers. We get to put it through its paces and figure out what it really can do and how it can do it, and then we build these just really … pardon the expression, kick-ass demos to show to our customers and to anybody else that wants to see them. So yeah, that’s what I do. I lead a team and they are all all-stars and amazing people, and we have just been killing it.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, it sounds like fun. I mean, that’s also what admins do, get our hands on stuff and try and build killer demos to get our executives to fund it.
John Demby:
Yeah, we’ve got a lot of similarities there.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, I mean, also a very close kinship. You kind of started out with Tableau the same way I did, you were just a super admin power user that got hired on.
John Demby:
Yeah. My story goes back to a long time ago … man, probably about 12, 13, 14 years ago, I was working with Salesforce data. I was leading at that time a pre-sales organization, and I couldn’t get a decent report out of Salesforce, no offense to dashboards and reports. It was partly because of the way we had configured our Salesforce data. I mean, we had the same company in Salesforce maybe 70 times because they were all around the globe and stuff like that. I couldn’t figure out where my solution engineers were spending their time. I did a Google search, found this really cool thing called Tableau, downloaded it, and within about 10 minutes I had the report that I’d been wanting to make for months. So I filed that away and became a power user of Tableau, and then when I was ready for a career change, it just worked out. Tableau and I made things happen, came to work for Tableau. I did some pre-sales work for Tableau and then we got acquired by Salesforce.
And then I got to do all sorts of cool things, like move into the office of the chief product officer where I worked on Salesforce Tableau integration strategies, and now I get to lead my fun team.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I remember … Well, I mean, you’re right, there’s totally a limitation on the reports and dashboard stuff. But I remember the last time we talked, one of the things you gave me the insight into was just all the visualizations that Tableau could do. I think it was, “The biggest common mistake is, everybody makes a pie chart.”
John Demby:
Oh yeah, pie charts are not very good for analyzing data, believe it or not. But yeah, we build that into the product. In fact, when you start analyzing your data in Tableau, we actually propose or suggest or give you the best practice visualization for what you’re trying to find.
Mike Gerholdt:
So it’s not a dashboard of pies.
John Demby:
No, not a dashboard of pies.
Mike Gerholdt:
That’s okay. We have AI now, so let’s talk about that because we’ve got Tableau Einstein and Pulse. Help me figure out what these are because these sound fun.
John Demby:
Well, I want to talk to you a lot about Pulse today, but let’s talk about Tableau Einstein real quick. So Tableau Einstein … Well, just back up. AI in general is disrupting everything and very much so in the business analytics space. Two years ago I went to the Gartner Data and Analytics Conference, and all the vendors were starting to talk about AI. Last year, it was the subject of everybody. It was everybody had a cockpit, or a copilot rather, and were starting to feed data into LLMs, and now it just got to be part of the table stakes of the application. You’ve got to be able to use the power of AI to be able to generate and understand and see things even quicker. So what we did with Tableau Einstein is, we are envisioning a new paradigm infused with AI and built on the Salesforce platform. So we’re actually taking all of the goodness of Tableau, we’re bringing it over to Salesforce, we’re using all of the fantastic features of Data Cloud. We’re adding things like a new semantic layer that we call Tableau Semantics, and then on top of all that we have Tableau Agent, which is part of the Agentforce family. It is going to be an evolving product, we showed our vision at Dreamforce.
It’ll take us the next couple of releases to fully get it realized, but it is an amazing leap forward as it relates to AI and especially integrating into Salesforce data.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, is it really any surprise? Because I feel like for the last couple of years, especially once we talked about Data Cloud, I remember having guests on talking about data lakes, and joked about putting the cabin out on a data lake. I mean, we’re at the point now where the amount of organizational data that we are creating, it’s almost incomprehensible to be analyzed by any human.
John Demby:
Oh, absolutely. In fact, what AI gives us, which is kind of cool is … traditionally BI tools rely on structure. They need the data in rows and columns or in a database or in something of that format. And what AI begins to do is, it allows us to reach unstructured data and that’s a big value prop for Data Cloud right now, is that people are able to ingest unstructured data. Tableau Einstein is on top of that and able to see both structured and unstructured data through AI. So it’s really, to me it’s exciting. I’ve been in this space for a long time, and to see this disrupt and then us embrace the transformation has been pretty fantastic.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think back to the early days of Salesforce, talking about Einstein, and us talking about having to feed it 100,000 rows for the LLM to understand in a very simple use case, what makes an opportunity more likely to be won versus lost? And to feed it all of that data, but boy, you had to get your data in line. Everything was, get your ducks in a row, data, data, data this. And now it’s data but it’s like, well, let the AI figure it out. Right?
John Demby:
Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that Salesforce has really hammered home, especially with our AI vision is, context is everything when it comes to AI. As much context and information that you can drive … and we have it in Salesforce just out of the box, begins to really drive that AI interactivity in a way that without the context, yeah, AI is pretty dumb at that point if it doesn’t really understand the context of what you’re asking.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Now, you sounded excited for Tableau Einstein, but you sounded over the moon for Tableau Pulse. So tell me about Pulse.
John Demby:
We released Pulse back in February … I guess, here’s my question for you, Mike. When is the last time you picked up an actual newspaper?
Mike Gerholdt:
You mean, outside of needing it to start a charcoal fire?
John Demby:
Yeah. Or actually read it or something like that. But you were probably like me, you probably got the Sunday paper back in … now, we’re dating ourselves here-
Mike Gerholdt:
I know, little age. Absolutely, the Sunday, because it had the thickest classifieds.
John Demby:
Oh, yeah. Well, thickest classified, but it had all the-
Mike Gerholdt:
And the Sunday cartoons.
John Demby:
… cartoons and for me it had the score, all the information about the college games from around the country and stuff like that. But even when we had Sunday papers, if you were like me, you didn’t read it in order, you went and grabbed your favorite section. Maybe for you it was the classifieds, maybe it was the comics or something like that, so you would pick and choose. And then when you actually go through the newspaper, you probably would read a headline and if the headline didn’t grab you, you probably just moved on. Since the pandemic and since the advent of smartphones, and our attention spans really coming down considerably … there’s lots of research that talk about that, now most people consume their news maybe on their smartphone. I know I use a news app and I’ve curated what I want, I pick the sources that I’m interested in, and it surfaces me high-level summaries. In the morning when I wake up, I look at the news, want to make sure the world is still around.
I scroll through and I find something, maybe the latest story about Taylor Swift and that other dude she’s dating.
Mike Gerholdt:
He plays football.
John Demby:
Yeah. He plays football and they were saying, at the Taylor Swift concert Sunday they were actually playing the football game on the big screen. So go figure how far we’ve come. But yeah, it’s really a different paradigm where we look for information so we started thinking about, how do people consume data? I think it’s changed. I think people want to consume data in the flow of their work. I think they don’t necessarily want to have to go look for it. They don’t want to have to go interrogate a very complex dashboard. They want it to be contextual, they want it to be informational, they want it to be relatable to what they’re looking at. And then they want it to tell them maybe in plain language, maybe through AI, things that they should be worried about and things that they should double-click on. So that’s what we did with Pulse was, we totally re-imagined how people consume data for information. We built an app that’s very similar in some ways to a newspaper app on your phone, that lets you pick the metrics that you’re interested in, you can double-click on them. It’ll tell you what’s up, what’s down.
It has AI infused in it, it has the ability to really give you insights very quickly. So then what you need to do is to take action, either early warning or corrective action, or even if something’s going great, letting your team know it’s going great.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, listening to you describe it, for the longest time that I’ve built reports and dashboards, I’ve never really thought about it in the way that you described it. But the way that I hear you talk now, it makes sense. Because if you think about driving your car down the road, you look down at the speedometer and some gauges, make sure you have gas. You get real-time information in your car so that if you’re coming up on an exit and your car is getting low on fuel, you know to exit to get fuel. Whereas traditional reporting, you would do most of the trip and then you’d stop and go, okay, so how fast was I going and when do I need fuel? You’re like, oh, I actually ran out of fuel a mile ago, as a traditional dashboard. So when you say it gives insights in the flow of work, where does that surface? What should an admin be thinking about, where should they put these insights and what should they be looking for?
John Demby:
Well, we launched the original product, Tableau Pulse, in February. Since then we have over 5,000 customers, that were basically Tableau customers that have adopted the product. About the beginning of the summer we started asking the question, what if we could do, bring Pulse natively to the Salesforce platform? What would that look like? How would people consume it? And things like that. So we were very aggressive. We took a very agile approach, maybe almost like a startup, and we built a companion product to Pulse that we called Pulse for Salesforce. And what it does is, it takes these metrics really show up in the form of a KPI card. The KPI card, like I said, has a big number. It tells you if you’re up or down, gives you a spark line, begins to tell you in plain language what’s happening. So you can read that and then as you double-click into it, it gives you all of the additional information you’ve asked for. The outliers, the what’s up, what’s down, what’s causing this, what should I be looking at? So over the summer we built Pulse for Salesforce and we released it a couple of weeks before Dreamforce. It is as simple as installing a managed package, and then we drop in nine pre-configured Sales Cloud metrics. So we started with Sales Cloud, we’re looking at expanding into the other clouds, into the industries and Service Cloud. But it actually gives you nine pre-built metrics.
The good news is, we gave you permissions to be able to create all the metrics you want on any of the data, as long as you surface it inside of Salesforce from that perspective. If you’ve got some external data that your salespeople would really value and seeing right there on the opportunity record or the home page or something like that, you can actually add those metrics, not just the nine that we ship. It’s just embedded in Salesforce. It works on Salesforce mobile. We actually made it to pop up off the utility bar, which people think is really cool. So I’m right there in the sales app and at any point I want, I hit the button and I’ve got Pulse metrics. But yeah, you can stick it anywhere inside of Salesforce. We give you those nine pre-built ones, but we don’t limit you to that. It’s a simple app but it is a very powerful app, and we’re already seeing demand. We’ve got hundreds of customers already lined up that want to get onboard with Pulse for Salesforce.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, that utility bar is so underutilized, I need to work that into demos more. As you explain through that, I’m hearing yet another reason for Data Cloud. Because it’s not only the data in Salesforce but the data that you bring to, or surface as you said. So if I had Data Cloud and I was just bringing in data, then Tableau Pulse can help me bring insight to that as well.
John Demby:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Pulse for Salesforce assumes that maybe you don’t have Data Cloud, so we don’t make that a requirement. But if you do have Data Cloud … or if you are moving along with us because you really see the value of Agentforce and all the things that Data Cloud is going to power, then yes, Tableau has a live connector to Data Cloud. You could create these additional metrics or data that you bring into Data Cloud or Zero Copy or any of that kind of stuff right there in Data Cloud, and then have these Pulse metrics sit on top of them, so that you’re giving your people the most up-to-date information possible so they can make data-driven decisions.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think I heard you say this, but I just want to make sure because this is really cool. Tableau Pulse helps me understand the what, but I think you were getting at more than that, it also helps me understand the why. Can you explain that?
John Demby:
One of the things we’ve built into Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Pulse is, in addition to surfacing insights that may be relevant and popping those up immediately … Let’s just say for instance I’m looking, one of the out-of-the-box metrics for Pulse for Salesforce is conversion rate. The metric card tells me my conversion rate is down over the last month and gives me some indicators from that perspective. I double-click in, and maybe the first thing that Pulse tells me is, these are the segments that you’re underperforming in. So I can begin to take some analysis, maybe I need to look at that. But maybe I want to ask it a question, so we do have Q&A built into the product. I’m not bound by what Pulse tells me, I can actually click the ask button and then just type a plain language question like, tell me what industries are in decline? Or something like that. And then it will source that information for me and I can begin to do that additional analysis, and then with tools like Slack and others I can take those insights and even share them with others in my organization.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that was going to be my next question is, it’s fun if one person knows about it, but how do they broadcast that out? It sounds like you’ve got that figured out with collaboration.
John Demby:
Yeah, collaboration is built into the product. This idea of sharing is really critical in the solution, I could share a number of different ways. But keep in mind, we do usually encourage customers to adhere to some level of security. So if I try to share an insight with somebody they don’t have access to, that I’ve set up in Tableau, they won’t see it. But that’s fine because we want governance, we want data governance and stuff like that. But it still gives you that ability for that data you do share and you do have, to very quickly share those insights and start a conversation about it.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, that to me is one of the often overlooked things, you set up your profile, your permission set groups, once in Salesforce, and then everything on the platform respects that. You don’t have to worry about, oh, we use this third-party tool and then going over there and learning their terminology, and then configuring that and then hoping you got it right. I like that. As an admin, who do you often talk to in organizations about Tableau Pulse? Because more often than not admins are square in the middle of business process. They’re like the BAs. They often do BA work. They know the pain points of the end user and they often need to translate that up to executives to say, here’s a way that we can improve our process better, but also it’s going to cost money. Where often in organizations are you talking to people about Tableau Pulse?
John Demby:
Well, Pulse is really, it’s interesting, when Tableau first started, Tableau really spoke to the business user. We made it really easy that a business user … like I said in my introduction with how I found Tableau, could easily go and get a license and start using Tableau. We still do that today. We still have an online store and anybody can buy Tableau, even if it’s one license to get started and things like that. But it’s usually the business that drives this. It’s like, okay, I need these insights. I would imagine it’s the same customers that admins deal with on a day-to-day basis, is their end users and leaders and people that are overseeing things in Salesforce, they want these kind of things. And what we’ve done, especially with Pulse for Salesforce is, because of the managed package we’ve made it really easy for a Salesforce admin to set this up with really little to no Tableau experience, and then get started. And then they can expand their usage and learn more about the product and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s the business I think is really who’s driving a lot of this. In fact, one of the things, it’s a stat that’s out there is, if I remember it right, 70% of leaders really want their organizations to be data-driven.
But when you look at it, only about 30% of the potential knowledge workers … think of a knowledge worker as really anybody that could use data to influence a decision, so that could be all the way down to the shop floor. So knowledge workers are everywhere, they’re not just behind a desk and things like that, but only about 30% of those actually have access to data. Sometimes, like I said, it’s locked away. It may be in a dashboard, so we actually ask them to go find it. But the future is really bringing it in the flow, embedding it in where they are, being able to show it on things like mobile devices and tablets and all those accelerated devices where you can get more information. Yeah. I think admins will find that it’s a very common conversation to have with the business. We’re happy to have it with you, to talk to you about all the different industry use cases and all the different options that we’ve seen people use Pulse for.
Mike Gerholdt:
The perfect segue. I was going to ask, is one thing that I don’t ask enough on this podcast, I try to keep things generic and applicable to most. But industry use cases in industries, is there any industries this is specifically geared for, or which ones are really benefiting the most?
John Demby:
That’s a great question. In fact, in case my team actually listens to this … I don’t know if they will or not.
Mike Gerholdt:
Of course they do. Everybody listens to the admin podcast.
John Demby:
Everybody listens to the podcast, but I’ll actually compliment them. Because once we launched Pulse, we started on a mad project to enable and create as many industry demos as we could on Pulse. And do everything from HLS, healthcare to financial services to non-profit, to public sector to manufacturing, to … I’m going to leave some of them out, Salesforce, all the Salesforce clouds, really marketing, HR. There’s really not a use case out there that Pulse doesn’t meet some need for, because everybody’s got KPIs. And what’s kind of fun to me is, I had a sales … I’m going to talk about how great it is to use AI here too. I had a sales rep come to me and says, “Hey, I’ve got a customer, they’re buying Loyalty Management from Salesforce. I want to know what I could do from a Pulse perspective.” Well, we have 50 plus demos out there but we haven’t got the 51 done for Loyalty Management yet. It’s a product that I’m not as familiar with, so I turned to my friend AI that we actually have licensed in-house, so it’s secure and everything like that.
I simply ask it, tell me the Pulse metrics for Loyalty Management and next thing I know, I had about 10 Pulse metrics they called out that you could actually write on Loyalty Management. It was very simple, very clean. I could actually take those definitions, create my dataset for Loyalty Management, and build out those metrics just in a matter of minutes and then share them with the organization. So AI is helping us even figure out what ways to deploy our software, which I think is really cool.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, yeah, that’s always beneficial. You think of, especially for an organization like Salesforce, how much documentation and video and just even internal assets we create, it can be hard to know where it all is and what’s what too. John, thanks for coming on and talking Tableau Einstein and Pulse with us. It’s always good to hear. Are you going to any world tours this-
John Demby:
I think I may end up at the Dallas World Tour since it’s local.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, well, that makes sense. I would say, look for the guy in the cowboy hat, but if you’re going to the Dallas World Tour …
John Demby:
Surprisingly enough, even if-
Mike Gerholdt:
… you’re probably not the only person.
John Demby:
… the Dallas World Tour, I will probably be the only person in a cowboy hat. Because I seem to be pretty … Although it was interesting, I will say this, I was at, of course, Dreamforce with you a couple of weeks ago or a month ago or however long it was. I’m coming down the escalator-
Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t really know, it was in the past, in the time.
John Demby:
Yeah, it’s in the past. But I’m coming down the escalator and I’m going to do a session in one of the broadcast theaters, I literally walked by a guy with a cowboy hat. I was like, wait a minute, I’m the only one out of the 45,000 people who are supposed to have a cowboy hat in San Francisco.
Mike Gerholdt:
Didn’t you get the memo?
John Demby:
Yeah, there you go. But no, look for me at the Dallas World Tour. I would love to catch up with you in any other way, just reach out to me on LinkedIn or however you want to find me, I’d be happy to chat.
Mike Gerholdt:
Was it a white cowboy hat? Because I will say this, you have the most crisp white cowboy hat.
John Demby:
Yes. Well, I have a collection-
Mike Gerholdt:
I’m sure.
John Demby:
… much to the chagrin of my wife, but I do have a collection of cowboy hats. And yes, for Dreamforce I was wearing a nice, silver/white hat.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I remember it. So did the other person have a white cowboy hat or do you not remember?
John Demby:
I think it was brown.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. See, so you’re one of-
John Demby:
I was the only one with the silver cowboy hat there.
Mike Gerholdt:
Exactly.
John Demby:
There you go.
Mike Gerholdt:
No, it’s awesome. Good. Well, people make it down to Dallas, then look for you, I’m sure it will be hard to find anybody else walking around with a white cowboy hat. But also think of it, they can also just go, they’re in the perfect city to get themselves a white cowboy hat.
John Demby:
Yeah, there we go. Or ask me, I live in Fort Worth, I’ll hook you up with my hat guy if you want a hat.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, man. A good haberdasher that can form and foam, that is … I have gone down that rabbit hole of TikTok before for a couple of hours and watch them, how they can make those hats and steam and form, it’s an art.
John Demby:
In fact, I have one sitting by my desk, that I need to go see my hat guy and have him shape it back up because it’s a little crooked. I need to do that this week.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, so cool, I could watch those too. Thanks so much, John. Have a great world tour and we’re going to go check out some more Tableau Einstein and Pulse.
John Demby:
All right, sounds good.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, it was another great discussion with John. I hope you enjoyed this episode, I know I did. It was a fun reminder of just all the amazing things that Tableau can help us Salesforce admins do in terms of driving insight across our orgs. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to share it with a friend or a colleague, especially if you’re listening on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. Generally there’s three dots in the corner and you can click share episode, and then you can post it to social or maybe text it to a friend. Now, we mentioned a few things, any resources and really just a lot of content for you to check out is over at admin.salesforce.com. That’s where you can find a ton of blog posts that me and the whole admin team create to help you be successful with our product and in your career. Of course, you can find everything that we mentioned, links in the show notes, including an episode transcript if you need to go back and check that out.
And don’t forget to join the conversation with other Salesforce admins over in the admin Trailblazer group that is over in the Trailblazer Community. Again, you know where to find the link, it’s in the show notes. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.
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