How to stay away from red - Maven Sales Challenge

Purpose of this challenge

"..... create an interactive dashboard that enables sales managers to track their team's quarterly performance."

Based on data of the CRM. A very important remark: I read "track their team's " as track their team and not another team or sales agents of another team. This means boundaries, comparing only between agents in a team, and a dashboard dedicated to one salesmanager/team.

The select manager page is only to make it possible for this challenge to switch between managers/teams, in real life the manager would start with the summary dashboard, the rest would be authentication and autorisation.

This dashboard tries to give the manager an overview of most important KPI's and detailed insights in past performance & future opportunities of the agents. With different viewpoints, which means the KPI bar adjusts to the selection.

Assumptions for this dashboard:

• the salesmanager is able to remember an approx. adviced product price by head
• the salesmanager is able to do some creative thinking
• the salesmanager is able to do simple calculations by head
• You talk to a sales manager before this dashboard is being used.

This last point is important because the dashboard migh look a bit incomprehensible but it follows a very simple line of thought:

• KPI's above with a qoq for the selection in the middle and

• below: past - what could have gone better revenue wise - future - what are points to consider

If you talk to a salesmanager you explain the insights to gain from or questions to ask, following different results on the lower part of. the dashboard.

Data preparation

Nothing special happened. I removed inactive members of the salesteams via Powerquery by adding an active true/false column and filtering out false.

Design

Top KPI

The dashboard is designed to display past to future from left to right.

The top is filled with KPI's. Left is revenue related, right is future related, in the middle a visual to show the revenue per quarter for the selected value(s). E.g: if you select an account you will see in the middle a small chart which shows the revenue from this account over the quarters. If you are viewing the team member tab, you will see a chart which displays the revenue for the selected sales agent over the quarters.

The purpose of this chart is to answer the question what happened to the revenue in the past, values are based on selected values. This chart can also answer gut feeling questions like "are we really losing revenue so fast that it looks like we lose this account"?

Or: I think this sales agent is generating less and less revenue, show me some numbers.

Bottom

Many answers to questions are context related. Maybe a sales agent is performing worse, the Team member details page can give information based on data . It will not give answers on the why, which could vary from "personal worries" to "our teams problemsolver when we try to keep accounts".

The bottom part of the pages follow this simple setup:

Left side: revenue and lost revenue based on recommended prices with on the right a chart showing if the revenue was above/below what could be expected if recommended prices where a used.

Right side summary page: sales revenue per agent - above/below recommended - engagement pipeline.

Right side details: pipeline for selection - above/below recommended per selection.

The above/below charts are placed to make it possible to think about past/future in a more concrete sense (revenue in K +/- value above/below) versus the future and performance in terms of above/below values.

Why the above/below charts?

As a manager it gives you, depending on the question you have, the opportunity to think about strategies/questions like:

• should I, do I want to, reassign engaged opportunities of a certain type to another sales agent.
• should I have a talk to.... agent, performance goes down
• should I think about a strategy for customer X, it looks like revenue is going down/up big time, all red, we bid below recommended values.

Why a help page instead of additional text on a page?

The dashboard is designed to give a salesmanager hard KPI's and insights to think about. The moment you get the setup is the moment you will hate a lot of additional text. And the basic idea is not complicated.

Other reasons to set it up this way:

this setup makes it possible to create a pdf without a lot of explaining text, or at least this was true until I added a background image because drawing a few 1px extra lines in Power BI is such a ....

this setup makes it easy to talk and discuss the most important numbers with just one sales agent, without showing details about other agents.

Why much white and not all but only important numbers on the screen?

I'm afraid that is a personal preference. The trend of what is happening is clear enough, including some key KPI's, white space gives room to think and generate ideas without other numbers directly influencing this process.

Why "How to stay away from red"?

Red means:

• decreased revenue
• increased revenue loss
• selling below recommended sales prices
• maybe agents strugging or losing customers, losing bids on a popular product or losing a customer?

Additional remarks

Explanations on calculations are in the help of the dashboard.

The dashboard uses one of the default accessibility themes, I added the color "Red". Let's call it Jasmin Red, it was in his Coffee dashboard and I liked it, used it and added a lighter variant for the KPI negative bars.

I really hate Power Bi styling and alignment. Key insight on styling: the moment you hide an y-label from a horizontal bar chart is the moment you will never be able to align this chart on y values with a horizontal barchart with y-labels on screen. I've tried to solve this by making the labels white and putting these charts below charts positioned left.