“What used to take 48 hours and some manpower is now five minutes, and I do it myself.”

Shazam’s media identification and discovery service launched in 2004 and was one of the first apps in the Apple App Store in 2008. Since then, the app has been downloaded more than a billion times in more than 190 countries. With Tableau CRM, Shazam leadership can now visualize one of its most important assets — data. Sales teams can now see their data in real time to help give advertisers a more focused audience and customers greater satisfaction.

A few short years ago, Shazam sounded like pure science fiction. Now, its simple app allows users to identify media in the world around them — more than 20 million times a day. Users can record, submit, and identify music, movies, images, and other media in seconds from their personal device. For many, the experience feels like magic.

The team at Shazam knows discovery and curiosity are the essence of the user experience. “We use ‘magic’ all the time as sort of a motivating word in the company,” said Greg Glenday, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Shazam. “You’re curious about something … and you want to know what it is. We built an entire business on that.” The Shazam team also knows that such an intimate moment of discovery, like stumbling across a new, summer-defining song, means customers expect a personal experience they can trust.

Shazam first launched in the pre-app age. Revolutionary from the start, the service asked users to text an audio clip that they wanted to identify, and users would receive an answer in under a minute. Now, with the app, they can get the same information in under two seconds. Over the past 14 years, the brand has evolved along with customer expectations and technological innovations.

“At Shazam, advertising became our biggest business,” said Glenday. “We used to just sell little banners on the app. Now we sell branded content. We sell custom takeovers. We sell augmented reality.”

The company must identify customer media trends for over 200 global advertising partners. Sales teams need to optimize their customer data and historical sales trends to identify future sales opportunities. And executives need easy oversight and trending.

Before Tableau CRM, Shazam’s sales teams had to clean inaccurate data and generate all of their reports manually, which consumed 15% to 20% of their time and resources. And while sales team leaders relied heavily on finance to generate reports, individual sales reps used their own disparate reporting systems. “We had a team that did a lot of things manually,” Glenday said. “At the end of the week I would get kind of a hodgepodge report that, frankly, I didn’t trust.”

Generating manual reports also meant that data was stuck in spreadsheets and never up to date, so advisors and team managers spent more time pulling data than analyzing it. Answering a simple question could take over two hours because relevant data sources had to be gathered and ported into Excel by hand. And after all that, there was no clear way to track quotas, forecasts, or performance metrics.

“Without Salesforce, we would be living in a world of spreadsheets,” said Pete Miles, VP of Ad Operations. “That can become a huge hindrance and create so much drag on a business, particularly on an analytics team and an operations team.”

The entire sales organization at Shazam needed to move away from time-consuming, inaccurate reporting. They chose Tableau CRM.

In just two months, Shazam leaders saw an eye-popping 752% return on their investment. Glenday was impressed: “What used to take 48 hours and some manpower is now five minutes, and I do it myself, which for me — to be able to do it myself — is a big deal.” With Tableau CRM, sales teams and executive leadership use sales data to understand historical data and pipeline trends without the wait.

Company leaders can drill into their data and understand key trends, helping them better coach their teams and drive better behaviors. Sales team managers can drill into their top accounts by advertiser names, brands, and holding companies. And reps know the data is current and clean.

“Everyone kind of understands that Salesforce is the source of truth,” said Anna Nguyen, Director of Account Management. “If you really want to understand how a campaign has done, how a certain account has done, everyone knows exactly where to go.”

Once Tableau CRM became integral to sales leadership and management, Shazam extended the tool to its entire organization of individual sales reps. Now, all reps can manage their personal pipelines and show clients up-to-date, relevant data — all from their phones.

“You can refresh a dashboard and get the latest data,” said Nguyen. “And giving people access to that data will empower them and give them the ability to make decisions on their own and work more independently.”

With Tableau CRM, Shazam is uniting its global team to create a single brand strategy for growth. It helps the team improve revenue stream, provide cleaner client data, and heighten the customer experience. Pete Miles concluded, “With Tableau CRM, we’re able to put a trusted source of data into the hands of our advertisers when they need it, providing a whole new way for our users to connect to the world around them.”