Arm the Analysts
Episode 22: Tableau's crazy growth
If you are in a remotely analytical position, say an analyst in marketing, finance, or product, you've likely heard of or used Tableau. It's what Adobe Photoshop is to designers or Microsoft Word is to writers. (Microsoft Excel doesn't count)
Tableau is a company that grew from $5 million in revenue in 2007 to $1.1 billion in 2018 when it was acquired by Salesforce. That means it averaged 64% growth every year for 11 straight years!
How did it grow so quickly and become the clear leader in a very competitive market.
It did so by a strategy I'll call Arm the Analysts.
First, a side story... Shopify is a company that makes a platform for individual sellers to run an eCommerce store.
It's known for a strategy called Arm the Rebels. Its goal is to give the small mom-and-pop stores the ability to fight the Amazon empire.
Tableau's strategy is a little different. Not so much The Force vs The Dark Side. More like The Analysts vs Messy Data.
Before dissecting this strategy I'll walk through what Tableau does.
What is Tableau?
Tableau is a visual analytics tool that makes it easier to make sense of data using interactive visualizations in the form of tables, charts and dashboards.
The easiest way to think about it may be this: let's say you want to create a chart showing sales over time. All you need to do is drag and drop a date and sales field in the right place and you're done.
Gif that shows the easy-to-use interface
The best way to think about Tableau is through its mission statement:
"Put the power of data into the hands of everyday people, allowing a broad population of business users to engage with their data, ask questions, solve problems and create value."
Solving this core use case has led to 15 years of double digit growth followed by an acquisition by Salesforce. Even now, almost 20 years after its founding, growth is still strong.
Arm the Analysts
There are many different stages in a marketing funnel, and each company names them differently, but usually there are three big phases customers can go through:
Awareness: when the customer learns about your offerings.
Conversion: where the customer makes a purchase or completes your desired action.
Advocacy: when the customer becomes part of a community that actively brings in new prospects.
While many marketers focus on getting users, through Awareness and Conversion, Tableau's success came from focusing almost exclusively on Advocacy. This benefited them immensely because their customers then became their best marketers, helping Tableau drive Awareness and Conversion.
Focusing on advocacy is what Arm the Analysts is all about. There are three components in Tableau’s case:
Build an easy-to-use product targeting end users
Architect a community that arms analysts for success
Make it easy for analysts to share their work and Tableau
1. Build an easy-to-use product targeting end users
As founder Christian Chabot says, “In [Business Intelligence] the dominant religion was that IT departments should control all the data and serve up reports for those silly business users.”
Tableau had trouble selling to IT departments so it bypassed them altogether and sold directly to marketing and sales departments, creating a new market in the process.
Ease of use, not functionality or power, became the gold standard for modern BI tools.
"Tableau's reference customers continue to purchase the product for its user experience at a higher rate than for most other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, and score its ease of use among the highest of all these vendors.” — Gartner BI Analyst
With Tableau an analyst can create a full dashboard from an excel file or database in a matter of minutes or hours not days. This allows for iteration and answering inevitable time-sensitive questions from execs.
Tableau's biggest strength has been the ability to improve the core functionality while keeping this ease of use the same
Check out the difference in the user interface between version 4.0 and 9
It's almost exactly the same, but trust me the functionality is wayyy better.
I still distinctly remember maybe a year into my job when I was asked for a view of revenue by State. In two minutes I created a map where each state was shaded according to revenue by dragging and dropping a couple data fields in Tableau.
My manager thought it was the most impressive thing he'd seen. I was armed for success.
2. Architect a community that arms analysts for success
What's the most frustrating thing about using technology? Not being able to find answers to inevitable issues.
If you have a question about an error in Tableau, how to build a certain chart, or design a dashboard it WILL be answered by Tableau's forums.
(While writing this on a Tuesday the most recent question was answered 5 minutes after it was posted. That's basically expert assistance on-demand!)
How did Tableau architect a community where someone would enjoy answering a question as quickly as possible?
Tableau incentivized users through these general stages of usage by intertwining Tableau's product with their career success.
Dashboard Creator:
End user of Tableau — creates dashboards to solve business problems.
Are motivated to become power users because it makes them better at the jobs and more successful in career.
Power User:
Expert at using Tableau to solve business problems.
The motivation here is success in your current job and helping co-workers.
(I consider myself a Tableau Power User and can definitely say it has greatly increased the ability to do my job and led to a generally successful career.)
Forum Expert:
An expert in Tableau who shares their expertise outside their current company.
Tabelau incentivizes users with Badges and Points given for answering questions. These are not intrinsically valuable, but still motivate experts all the same because people love to be helpful.
Ambassador:
Ambassadors get some special resources from Tableau but most importantly get recognition from the community. This can lead to speaking engagements, connections with other users and new job opportunities.
Tableau Ambassadors serve in one of six branches: Forums, User Groups, Academic, DataDev, Public, Social.
The value to Tableau from this program is crazy... The program is low cost, non-promotional since it’s run by users, and builds out their community around six important areas.
Zen Master:
This is the peak of Tableau stardom. Within the Tableau community these users are recognized for their knowledge and sharing. Tableau doesn't give many perks beyond what ambassadors get because the label is valuable enough.
Tableau Business Owners:
Most Zen Masters (and many others) make their sole living off Tableau either through consulting services, blogs, or even full service training companies.
"The Tableau community has given me so many joys and opportunities that it would take me all day to list them! What stands out for me the most is the virtuous circle of learning and sharing. — Jonathan Drummey, Tableau Zen Master Hall of Fame
The key aspect of this ladder is that the goals of Tableau and of users are completely aligned. Tableau wants users to help each other and share the experiences, and users want the same because it furthers their careers.
This isn't the first time big communities and companies have been built around a successful product, but it's one of the best examples. Qlik (a competitor) has built up a similar community and forums but the same incentives aren't in place therefore engagement isn't as high.
In many ways, products (software or otherwise) are no longer sold by salespeople or by ads, but by community members. As communication proliferates online, a company’s potential customers are being saturated with information... In this environment, users turn to each other as a trusted source for recommendations; the community-led sale is the one that wins. — Lisa Xu
3. Make it easy for analysts to share their work and Tableau
"A great brand has an audience that responds to it and amplifies it and carries it forward for you." — Elissa Fink (Tableau’s former CMO)
Product-driven growth is when a company specifically builds parts of its product to bring in new customers. Tableau has mastered releasing new features that provide value for its users and at the same time increase the ways to share Tableau.
First a timeline of Tableau's key products:
Tableau Desktop (2004): The core product. Create dashboards using a program on your desktop.
Tableau Server (2007): Share Tableau dashboards on your company's servers.
Tableau Reader (2008): A way for other users to view your dashboards without Server.
Tableau Public (2010): Share dashboards publicly.
Tableau Online (2013): Share dashboards internally using Tableau's servers.
You can think of them in two groups:
Tableau Server, Reader and Online allowed Tableau to be shared within an organization easily. All versions incentivized more usage of Tableau within a company.
Tableau Public allows users to share dashboards with anyone in the world. This was a game-changer for Tableau to increase learning and sharing.
To learn users can download other’s Tableau files and reverse engineer how they were built. (I can't tell you how many times I did this with visualizations I found interesting.)
For sharing, users could now publish dashboards in their own blogs, homepages and even Covid trackers.
The Colorado Covid-19 dashboard was built in Tableau. It's valuable for the state of Colorado to be able build a version so quickly and easily, and it's basically free marketing for Tableau.
Notice Tableau link in bottom left to Tableau Public.
Tableau's Customer Conference
Lastly, I couldn't write about Tableau's community and sharing efforts without talking about its yearly conference.
Tableau's very first customer conference in 2008 took place in a small hotel conference room and featured 187 guests.
Ten years later, in 2018, the conference in New Orleans attracted 17,000 attendees. It featured big name speakers, hundreds of sessions, a zip-line, Tableau doctors, 20 live music performances, and Iron Viz (the world’s largest data visualization competition).
(As a comparison, in 2018 Qlik's conference had 3,000 attendees and Looker’s had 1,300.)
It’s the premier way to build Tableau's community. One longtime Tableau Conference participant sums it up well...
Each year, the conference gets larger—but the heart of conference hasn’t changed. The learning is excellent and the customer stories help you realize that you are not the only one facing challenges and successes. The social events, the venue, the vendors, the speakers, the food…all of it is second to none. The sum total of the event creates an environment where we have the opportunity to learn, validate, share opinions, broaden relationships, catch up with old friends, and meet new people who have similar passions. — Gregory Lewandowski
Arm the Analysts (with jobs)
Beyond revenue growth, the best sign that this process of arming the analysts is working is if Tableau skills are included in job postings.
As Tableau improves its ease of use and shareability, users become more successful in their jobs, they then require it in job requirements at their company, attracting additional users.
Wouldn't be a #business article without a flywheel…
It's hard to see in the top right of each screenshot so I put the results below for each BI tool in job postings on LinkedIn in the US:
Tableau: 34,629 jobs
Qlik: 2,511 jobs
Microsoft Power BI: 13,415 jobs
Looker: 4,493 jobs
Organic demand will continue as long as it's financially rewarding to learn Tableau.
Closing Notes
Tableau has spent 7 consecutive years rated as a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for BI tools. It clearly makes a great product. However, its focus on its community of analysts is what sets it apart from most SaaS tools.
This is what Arm the Analysts means.
Build an easy-to-use product targeting end users
Architect a community that arms analysts for success
Make it easy for analysts to share their work and Tableau
Analysts are armed to fight the Dark Side (messy data)…
Including this meme a second time for anyone who makes it to the end of the article to enjoy.
Thanks to Emily and Kelsey for help with editing.