Does the best seller earn the most profits?

Goal:

Clean and arrange the data to help a sales manager track the progress of their sales agents. This was an open end task with no input from any sales manager. In other words, no particular questions were presented that would indicate which targets are of interest to them.

Questions:

1. It was decided that the first thing to catch a sales manager's attention would be concerning how their team is performing compared to the other sales teams. The All Sales column chart answers this question on the team level. Even though this chart would be the first one the manager would view, it was placed on the lower left corner because once viewed they would spend more time looking at the Team Sales chart and the adjacent Comparison chart.

2. The second thing a manager would want to know is how each agent in their team compare to each other. The Team Sales column chart answers this question. However, it only covers the last quarter and no previous quarters. To give better context to this chart the following chart was added to give a yearly performance picture. This chart gives more detail on why the agent's sales might be up or down. Was it just a bad quarter for this agent or everybody else too?

3. Looking at Team Sales chart for Melvin and Days to Close chart for agent Darcel raises the question of what makes this agent such a good salesperson? This is why the Closing Values by Days to Close chart was added. It gives insight to when the agents lower the price.

One can quickly see if agent Darcel usually lowers the price as the sale negotiations continue. A manager might want to view the profit range and suggest to their agents to start with a higher price but lower it as time goes on to help close the deal.

Note: The above Days to Close chart uses a Confidence Interval instead of a single number to represent the average closing time. The reason for this is because the time from engaging in sales talk to closing the sale can span over more than one quarter. Therefore, at most an average is just an estimate for the quarter and worthy of a Confidence Interval to portray it is an estimate for the quarter.

4. Last but not least, the two tables were added to help the manager view which items might need new sale prices, and whether their agents are trying to sell the product closer to the sale price. These tables could possibly help develop target audiences, sector, and lead their team in which products to concentrate on selling to increase sales. A separate page could have been developed based on products. However, managers usually already have an idea of which products are selling from past quarters. Plus, as the manager reviews each agent's product sales, they will get an idea of which products their agents are selling or reducing/raising prices.

Note: Additional picture is unedited version. Some pictures in the above description are from the unedited version. Newer version updated titles to make charts easier to understand.