Sales reports are a staple in the business diet. Done right, you have access to insight on team performance and progress toward sales goals. Sales reports then feed sales analysis, which is critical to accelerating business growth and bolstering revenues. Simply put: Sales analysis is a non-negotiable if you want your organization to be successful.
Many (if not most) businesses run much of their reporting and sales analysis in Excel. Since Microsoft 365 is a standard operating package for most organizations, Excel is easily available and fairly straightforward to learn. Pull the requisite sales data into a spreadsheet and you’re already well on your way toward building a strong sales analysis. Here are five of the top ways we’ve seen organizations we work with use Excel to analyze their sales data.
Five Ways to Analyze Sales Data in Excel
1. Heat Mapping
When confronted with a large table of numbers, it can be challenging to identify the most critical figures. Heat mapping, a powerful tool in Excel, can help you make sense of extensive raw data, enabling a clearer narrative. It’s as simple as selecting the data, navigating to the conditional formatting menu, and assigning various color scales to different data ranges.
2. Pivot Tables
Pivot tables are your best bet when aiming to distill valuable insights from textual data. Imagine you’re interested in customer distribution across cities. By creating a pivot table and adding the “city” data column to the row labels and value field area, you can easily sort by value and get an accurate count. Pivot tables can really help you quantify and report on text-based data.
3. Weighted Averaging
Weighted averaging is an essential component of sales analysis, as it recognizes that not all data points are equal. For example, to calculate your average profit per sale, you would need to evaluate the average profit margin of each product, weighted by the units sold. While Excel lacks a built-in formula for weighted averaging, using this formula with your data sets in columns A and B will yield the right figure: =SUMPRODUCT(A1:A10,B1:B10)/SUM(B1:B10).
4. Trend Spotting
Often, simple visualizations can provide insights faster than complex statistical analysis. For quick trend identification, select the data range and create a line chart to see the trajectory of your numbers.
5. Scenario Analysis
Scenario analysis is a powerful forecasting tool that can help you prepare for different sales outcomes. You can use the What-If Analysis feature in Excel to run different scenarios based on your sales data. For instance, you might want to see the potential impact on total revenue if the price of a product were to increase by 10% or if the sales volume for a particular product were to decrease by 15%. By changing these variables in your What-If Analysis, you can model different potential outcomes and make strategic decisions based on those predictions.
To use this feature, navigate to the Data tab, then click What-If Analysis and select Scenario Manager. There you can create and manage different scenarios based on your data.
Expanding Your Excel Toolkit: A Must for Every NetSuite User
Whether you’re examining historical sales data or trying to predict future trends, Excel offers a multitude of tools to help you make sense of your data. But what if you could make those insights even easier and more instantaneous? What if you could automatically pull the most up-to-date NetSuite information into your Excel reports on a scheduled basis or on-demand and see to-the-moment views of what’s going on in your business?
It is possible with the help of ExtendInsights, the purpose-built Excel integration app from CloudExtend. This Built for NetSuite certified app seamlessly connects NetSuite data to Excel, allowing users to pull and combine data from multiple saved searches into Excel spreadsheets and workbooks. Dynamic connections allow the data to be refreshed on a scheduled basis or on demand with a single click. Plus, by using those Excel reports to then feed data into Power BI, teams have access to incredible dashboards and visualizations that make it even easier to see what’s going on in the business to support better decision-making.
Supercharge your sales analysis in Excel today with the help of ExtendInsights. Get started for free, no credit card required.