To accelerate business growth and bolster revenue, strategic sales analysis is non-negotiable. Understanding trends and patterns in your NetSuite sales data through an incisive sales analysis in Excel can offer invaluable insights, enabling you to enhance profit margins and drive sales volume. Worry not about the requisite tools or training. Microsoft Excel, simplifies data manipulation, visualization, and reporting, turning your NetSuite data into actionable insights.
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. When combined with the robust functionality of ExtendInsights, these tools become even more powerful, transforming your data into clear, actionable insights.
For more recommendations on how to leverage these techniques and others, check out this comprehensive guide on Excel for data analysis. Remember, your data is only as good as your ability to analyze it. So, take the time to hone your Excel skills and unlock the full potential of your NetSuite sales data.