My Journey to becoming a Tableau Sales Consultant

My journey began a long long time in the winter of 2014. I was in the throws of a challenging data integration and dashboard development at a top telecommunications company. The tools at my disposal consisted of the entire BusinessObjects suite. At the time I had been an SAP BI consultant for 5 years. There had been some delays in getting the data ready for analytics so we did a lot of visual prototyping of the dashboards. We were to build three.

One day my manager called me, he rarely calls me and said we have a request from our client. They would like me to take a look at Tableau and tell them what we think about it. “Do this in your spare time and don’t charge them” I was told. I did some research and learned that I could download a trial so, that night I downloaded a a copy of Tableau Desktop and started my 14 day trial. 

Now some of these facts may be a little fuzzy, it was a long long time ago after all. I started by opening the sample workbooks and started clicking around. Things happened on the screen and it all looked pretty good, I had no idea what I was doing but I really like what I saw. I needed guidance.  I headed back to tableau.com and started looking for tutorials or videos. It did not take long for me to find the mother load of tutorials, all videos that showed me all I needed to know to become an advanced beginner with Tableau Desktop. I think I binged on all the beginner and intermediate videos, then I looked on YouTube for more. There was so much content I remember thinking that either this product is extremely popular or very difficult. It became the later for me in a couple of days. 

Tableau Desktop was not like any other tool I had seen before, drag-drop dashboards with little need to create difficult logic. It rendered beautiful visuals with ease and guided me with the help of Show Me and tooltips. I was getting hooked.

Near the end of the week I told my manager that I needed more time and I would like to have him purchase a license so I can continue my education. I sweetened the deal by explaining to him that I think we can use Tableau to analyze our sales pipeline. I received my license a couple of days later.

We offered our analysis to the client and they considered Tableau for the next project, they were already pretty well committed to use BOBJ.

Now it was time for me to build my own worksheets with our sales pipeline data. the data was easily exportable to Excel from Smartsheet so I was able to start building right away. As I built the sheets, I watched the advanced videos to learn more about what I can do with my new ‘data toy’. I was so impressed with the product and what I was able to develop that I was eager to share with the entire sales team. I requested a meeting to demonstrate Tableau and propose our new sales forecasting solution. I showed them the individual sheets and then brought it all together in a dashboard with filtering, drilling and several selectors. 

After about 20 minutes the VP of sales said, “Scott, this is great but I have one problem. You are a busy guy and I want this now”. 

I started to package the dashboard and send them out via email and that worked for a couple of weeks, but ultimately we needed a better way. I then transitioned my attention to understanding Tableau Server. This is what we needed but did not go anywhere after a short trial. The primary reason was time not functionality, we were all to busy to take on a tool for internal use only. 

For the next few months, I tweaked the dashboards but my Tableau days were coming to a close. In my mind, I knew we should embrace this product as it was the best tool I ever saw to create fast data visualizations.

Fast Forward 12 months (I continued as a Visual Analytics Consultant), I heard from a friend that works at Tableau and he asked me what I thought about coming over and joining a sales team. The idea intrigued me and I considered it for a few weeks. Then the moment happened, the time was right to pursue a new opportunity. We talked and he took my resume and pushed it up the chain. I was happy to hear that there was interest and I would be getting a call. The next few weeks were exciting with hesitation. Not only would I be leaving the tools that I had been using for many years, I would also be moving from post to pre-sales. 

I am going to gloss over the next few weeks as the details do not matter to the happy ending. I did the calls, interviews and sales demo presentation then the big day. “Hello, this is Scott”, “Hi Scott, we like you and would like to offer you a position with Tableau as a Sales Consultant”. I did not try to hide my excitement, I couldn’t. I said YES, I would like to start tomorrow! 

Now that I have started, I can now say, My name is Scott Strool, Tableau Sales Consultant. Our mission is to help people see and understand their data.  

July 2015