Analyze Whitespace Opportunities and Team Performance
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify cross-selling opportunities with the Product Whitespace Analysis dashboard.
- Monitor your team’s performance with the Sales Manager - Sales Rep Performance dashboard.
ABC: Always Be Cross-Selling
Do you remember that in Unit 2, Gustavo found that the Northeast store groups weren’t performing well? Field reps must increase visits to the stores in this group to raise compliance rates. To further improve future prospects, Gustavo wants to pursue cross-selling opportunities in Northeast stores.
Gustavo launches the Whitespace Analysis dashboard. The dashboard illustrates stores with whitespaces, which are opportunities to introduce a product or a product category. A heatmap shows a grid of products or product categories and stores. The color gradient indicates the amount of revenue earned or quantity sold.
The dashboard also displays the revenue and quantity of the products or product categories across time so you can assess if they are worth introducing. The Whitespace Analysis dashboard can also be embedded on a Retail Store record’s page layout. To see product category whitespaces in Northeast stores, Gustavo clicks on the Product Category tab and selects Northeast in the Store Group global filter.
He sees that the Cereal product category has a good revenue inflow in all the stores except Fare Merchants - Brooklyn, which doesn’t sell this line of product yet. He wants to identify one leading product within this product category, which is most likely to do well.
To achieve this, he clicks the Cereal cells associated with the four stores where their performance is good.
In the ranking of products displayed in the Revenue and Quantity chart, he observes that Alpine - Oat Cereal has the highest revenue. To check the product’s performance trend, Gustavo clicks the Alpine - Oat Cereal product bar. In the Product Performance Trend area, he notices that the product’s total sales volume has been very consistent.
Alpine - Oat Cereal has the most revenue in its product category and its sales quantity has a positive track record. Seeing these positive signs, Gustavo decides to introduce it to Fare Merchants - Brooklyn.
Teeming with Team Insights
Gustavo is elated with his progress so far. He has one last thing on his plate: he would like to appraise the performance of a field rep, Chantelle Arceo. Chantelle had asked Gustavo about areas in which she could improve. Gustavo opens the Sales Manager - Sales Rep Performance dashboard. With it, he can answer the following questions.
- How do field reps rank based on their performance?
- Are there any associations between two key performance indicators?
- What are the strengths and areas for improvement of individual field reps?
Gustavo opens the Sales Rep’s Performance view and selects Chantelle Arceo from the Select a Rep dropdown. Here, he can track all the KPIs related to Chantelle’s performance, visits and compliance, her ranking for each KPI, performance trends over time, and whether she’s above the team average or not.
He summarizes his observations.
- Chantelle is above the team average in terms of the revenue share of stores visited.
- She has an appreciable number of completed visits, productive visits, and average visits per day. In fact, she ranks second in the team for the productive visits metric. However, her total number of visits is lower than the team average.
- She is not doing so well with her compliance-related rankings except her average share of shelf compliance, where she ranks third in her team.
Gustavo wants to compare her performance with that of the top-performing field rep. He opens the Team Performance view, which shows the ranking of all the field reps in his team. Here he can see that Ricky Coyier is his highest ranking rep. He can view the rankings by revenue or visits. Gustavo chooses to view the field rep rankings by revenue.
He finds that Ricky Coyier is at the top, with $1.1 million revenue generated in the current year. Chantelle is second, with $971,000 revenue. As Chantelle is also trailing on her number of visits, Gustavo would like to explore if that metric has any impact on the revenue incurred.
He clicks on the Ricky Coyier field rep bar. Then, he chooses to view the trends of the Revenue and Visits KPIs.
Gustavo notes a pattern: Ricky’s revenue grew greatly in the weeks where he had at least four visits. To confirm the notion that revenue and visits are correlated, he clicks the Chantelle Arceo field rep bar.
He notices that Chantelle has a fewer number of weeks that have at least four visits. Gustavo realizes that despite her remarkable revenue metrics and number of productive visits, it is the low compliance rating that has been holding back Chantelle. He discusses this with Chantelle and suggests she improve her compliance going forward.
In this unit, Gustavo evaluated the performance of all NTO assortments, found out the best- and low-performing products in that assortment, and helped one of his field reps improve her performance. In the next unit, we step into Chantelle’s shoes and explore some more dashboards.