Salesforce to Acquire Tableau: Takeaways for Marketers

Salesforce has entered into an agreement to acquire Tableau for $15.7 billion. Salesforce will now play an even bigger role in driving digital transformation, helping companies make smarter decisions and driving intelligent, connected customer experiences and innovations.

CRM leader, Salesforce made a strategic move with the acquisition of Tableau, a self-service analytics platform and interactive data visualization company. The $15.7 billion purchase is an all-stock transaction, and the deal will involve shares of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock. Once the acquisition is complete, Tableau will continue to operate as an independent entity headquartered in Seattle, Washington.

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Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau raises the bar on data analytics and visualization for the entire CRM industry. Microsoft has a strong Power Platform that includes Power BI, but eventually having analytics/visualization more natively embedded within Salesforce CRM offers tremendous potential value and convenience to sellers, marketers, and general managers.

~ Dustin Grosse, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Nintex

With a shared commitment to customers and communities, both companies are looking to empower their respective communities, through digital transformation. This will result in a revolution — millions of professionals transforming the world through a better understanding of data.

Learn More: Google Set to Acquire Looker to Strengthen Its Analytics Solution

What Can We Expect From the Tableau Acquisition?

Tableau and their big data expertise coupled with Salesforce’s Customer 360 can deliver intelligent and intuitive analytics capabilities for every department, help marketers and the sales organization make smarter decisions, drive intelligent, connected customer experiences, accelerate innovation and enable brands to reach a much broader set of customers and users.

This acquisition allows Salesforce to ultimately provide an integrated and bundled solution that customers can leverage to drive growth. Existing Tableau users could benefit from easier Salesforce integration and Salesforce users could get a well established data visualization platform.

~ Ray Johnson, Chief Data Scientist at SPR

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Key Takeaways for Marketers

Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau will have a profound impact on the entire sales industry. On average, sales organizations use 10 different technology tools—but despite this abundance of options, few organizations can use those tools to find, clarify or execute on decisions.  Business intelligence that comes from providers like Tableau is at an inflection point and a huge part of what defines a world-class sales organization according to our most recent research from CSO Insights, our research division.

~ Byron Matthews, President and Chief Executive Officer of Miller Heiman Group

By joining forces, Tableau and Salesforce can impact SMBs and enterprises alike looking for digital transformation. It will help marketers analyze tons of data, engage audiences and understand customers. With Tableau, you can access data from various Salesforce clouds you use, such as customer relationship management, marketing and sales to make well-informed decisions and for better collaboration.

Adam Selipsky, President and CEO of Tableau, said “Joining forces with Salesforce will enhance our ability to help people everywhere see and understand data.” Salesforce might even be able to integrate Tableau’s business analytics across its different offerings, which will help CMOs manage and analyze their data better.

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Considering Microsoft’s Power BI is Tableau’s competitor, Salesforce seems to have set a pretty clear target with this acquisition. Microsoft and Amazon already have their analytics and business-intelligence platforms in place, and Google’s acquisition of Looker just last week shows that all major tech companies are preparing for winter in the game of data.

We’ll leave you with some food for thought from Abhi Yadav, CEO, Zylotech: "It comes as no surprise that Salesforce wants in – data is the name of the game and the foundation for revenue generation in the foreseeable future. Companies that are able to tap into the huge quantities of data and extract timely analytics that help inform customer strategies know that this results in a significant competitive edge. With today’s advancements in artificial intelligence that can significantly enhance traditional marketing, sales, and CRM practices, we can expect to see even more market consolidation as players seek to unify data sets to deliver a cohesive and comprehensive customer-centered view that drives and informs decision-making. Take it even one step further – by coupling advanced data analytics with a smart revenue growth strategy, organizations are going to be able to manage the evolving complexities and redefined relationships between businesses and customers like never before.”

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