 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's The Cube at Tableau Conference 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back. And when we hear live in Seattle, Washington for Tableau's user technology conference, date of 14, this is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the silicone noise. Some say the ESPN of tech, we've been called. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And our next guest is Sarah Stone, marketing advertising manager for the Texas Rangers. And I had to weave in that ESPN of tech comment. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you. We love doing the kind of the talk, sports center kind of analysis. But sports is about really technology these days. And one of the things that we find fascinating is, you know, you have the Moneyball book. Michael Lewis was the keynote here. You got his autograph, great stuff. But that's opening up everyone's eyes to the fact that, okay, you can use technology now in all businesses, in all verticals. Sports is no different than any other vertical. So tell us, what's going on with you in the Rangers? Their data, you become the data czar with Tableau. Tell us how it all got started. Well, working in the front office for the Texas Rangers is a lot of fun. And we're starting to see the channeling of the whole Sabre metrics, Moneyball spirit from the baseball side and bringing it to the business side of operations. So we sort of started out in marketing and advertising was saying, hey, let's take a look at our past attendance and see how our media buys and advertising flights really moved attendance on certain days, has placing a bobble head on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday driven more premium inventory to be bought. So we're trying to bring that sort of analytic, like let's actually look at the data approach to the business side of the front office. So how did you get there? Was it just woke up one morning and said, I'm going to do this or did it come down from the top? Was it kind of just came together? Well, in my previous job in political advertising, I worked with Tableau a lot. So when I started working for the Rangers a year ago, I said, hey, I think there's this program that could help us out, that could help us look at our data. So it really just started honestly was looking at promotions and giveaways in the 2013 season. And we actually saw a lift on Tuesdays in attendance due to these all fan giveaways. And we presented it at a board meeting and it was really these two slides that showed a simple fact and increase in attendance that got the kind of the leadership thinking, okay, this is a software we could use. Yeah, I was joking with the Tableau guys earlier and Jeff Kelly who's out doing some interviews on the floor about this, we're living in an API economy, but also this other theme we've been kicking around, the notification economy. You get your Facebook notifications on your iPhone. In a way, this is what you're doing. You're Tableau is allowing you to present the data and get the attention management saying, hey, you know, being data point, notify. Is that the value of Tableau in your opinion? Is that the magic? Yeah, I think so. I think one thing that's been really great using Tableau in the organization is that it allows us to connect directly to like our ticketing database, for example. And although we had live connections and certain people could go in there and see what sales look like for a certain game, being able to connect to that database with Tableau and then get these live updates allows all sorts of users within the front office to go in there and get the same information. So it's really disseminated this real-time information and then easily to ingest format. So Sarah, let me get this right then. You had the secret weapon in your back pocket and walked in, crafted up some data, showed everyone and boom, home run. It's, I would say exactly like that. It's really cool to see the collaboration that's taking place in our office environment. And I think once you show people in different departments, hey, like this can help you understand your data and you help them build their own dashboard, say in finance or in like the box office. That's really kind of what caught fire and the collaboration through the whole organization has been really exciting. Well, I think that's awesome. One of the things we always say here in theCUBE is we're living in an era where you can measure everything now. So the data's there. The question is how do you get it in and then who and what is analyzed around it? So what other insights have you discovered? What other aha moments have you had that were like blo- that blew you away? Like, oh my God, that's amazing. I never would have saw that. Well, recently people in our IT department were looking at finance data and they were looking at our cell phone expenses. And you know, being in baseball scouts are traveling internationally and those are gonna be really expensive cell phone bills. So in a spreadsheet that would normally like not look very exciting, they connected it to Tableau and it came really apparent like who were the biggest offenders, you know? And like what departments are spending the most? And so that was kind of a recent success story for us to say, hey, let's apply this to like another sort of data set. And it got people excited. So it's kind of a boring example of like cell phone data but it was really exciting throughout the organization. But that's business operations. I mean, that's basically like you can say, well, slap on the wrist for talking too much or hey, they're doing deals. Right, exactly. So you kind of know, wait a minute, you're on the phone, there's no deals. What's happening? Or just get WhatsApp. Or maybe that's not the right sanctioned approach. But what are the things that you enjoy about Tableau Share, the story around the collaboration because the community of Tableau is pretty, not pretty strong, very strong. So were you alone in this? Do you have coworkers as they've been spreading like Kool-Aid? Thankfully, there's some key like Tableau advocates, some of my coworkers in different departments and we actually get together and we form our own little group, like an analytics ops group. We have our own kind of geeky name, which is fun. But one of the things I love about Tableau is that it's pretty easy to teach to people, right? It's really user friendly and I'm not like a data person or an IT person. I'm just like in marketing and advertising but I learned how to use Tableau and I can teach it to people in ticket sales, in the box office and finance. I think one of the most exciting things is to see how other people, once they get connected and know how to use it, how they get excited. And the work we sit together will lock ourselves in an office that's not being used and just start jamming away and the IT person will know, well, here, let me write the query for that. The ticket sales person will know, I know this field in the database means and I could say, well, here, let me show you how to make it in Tableau and really, we all get together and make dashboards. You have a Tableau party. You all have it. We do. You're turning people into data geeks. Well, we kind of, well, we're kind of geeky anyways. We love numbers. I mean, baseball is a game of numbers and so it's really fun to see that on the business side. Yeah, that's exciting. So we look at the technology out there in sports teams. There's a huge trend to essentially use technology across all aspects of the organization. Operations, managing the team, managing the club, front office, and then the fan experience. Has the Tableau formula moved to the fan experience piece yet? Looking at other data inside the stadium? You know, that's something we're moving forwards to. We haven't really done much of that yet. One of our kind of dream goals is to have a live dashboard for game time that has concessions data and parking data, the box score, weather data, ticket scan data so we can know where people are, what areas are congested, maybe change your staffing based off of that. So we haven't quite gotten there, but it's where we want to head. So when we were doing a live interview at AT&T Park where the Giants are, we were kind of geeking out on all their geekness. And I said to the, when we were doing the broadcast, I said, we're going to go to all the parks and we're going to grade them on their tech. So I got to ask you, how would you grade the Rangers on their overall tech adoption? Great, getting there or low? Well, I don't know if it's quite up to Silicon Valley, San Francisco Giants standards, but I would say it's pretty good. I mean, it's obviously a priority for us in a focus. We have a great social media team who's always keeping the fans updated, a really great in park entertainment group that's always trying to, trying to include all the social media stuff during the in-game experience. So I would say it's on the great side. Yeah. I mean, I was talking to the guy who was CIO for the Dallas Cowboys and he was telling me about some coolness that they had, which was like they have data that looks at the fan sentiment on wins and losses. And what they do is they can raise prices of the jerseys and the drinks based upon certain things. And they say, certain sporting events, they drink a lot. So they raise the prices or when they lose, they sell less jerseys so they drop the price, right? It's kind of the real time kicks in there. Are you guys using any real time stuff in terms of the ad buys that you're doing? Are you looking at real time data or is it more of a historical data set? Right now it's more historical. I mean, we're basing off previous seasons and how the team's reformed on their win loss history and looking at certain days of the week. So we're trying to be more reactionary. We can change on our creative pretty easily, but if we wanted to say move resources, funds from one media flight to support another home stand, we could totally do that. So we're aware of those things and we're trying to become more nimble. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I want you to share to the folks watching that might not be completely addicted to Tableau's software or had the Kool-Aid injection, how to get started, why Tableau? Is it as good as what people say? Just how do they get started? Share some advice to some of your peers. Right, so we got started at the Rangers by going to TableauSoftware.com and just downloading a trial version, right? So that's how this whole ball got rolling. Find your favorite Excel spreadsheet of data that you're used to working with that you know and connect to that through Tableau. They have a lot of great resources on their websites, videos to watch of how-tos, maybe watch a few of those, connect to your favorite spreadsheet, the data that you know and then start playing around and that's really the beauty and the fun of it is you can't really make any mistakes. You can just go in there and experiment. It's really iterative, it's really, and the whole storytelling thing, although it's a little bit kind of a marketing thing now, but it really is about, no one gets the story right the first time, no one can knock the presentation out without doing a dry run. So whatever your metaphor is, their model of getting data and just getting your hands on it is the right way. I mean, having the one answer, the one query isn't the way to go. Sarah, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Great conference. What do you think about the event? This is a wonderful, that it's so much fun, it's over the top. I mean, who knew a bunch of data geeks could be like this extroverted and fun? It's wonderful. They are fun, aren't they? They are, a lot of fun. Yeah, Tableaus, they play hard and work hard. That's the company culture. We are here live in Seattle. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.