One of the most common reports we are asked for by salespeople is not what IS selling and who to, rather they are more interested in finding which of their regular customers:
- Are NOT buying - Often these are the easiest to sell to, or
- Are buying LESS - This may indicate you are starting to loose them
There are a few ways to do this depending on what you want to see :
- Snapshot of Customers by Last Sales Date or Days Since last purchase See how
- List Regular Customers who have Stopped Buying See how
- Quarterly / Monthly Trends : Customer Sales sorted within a sales period See how
- Compare Periods showing decline See how
- Decline in Moving Annual Totals See how
1. Customer Card List
For a simple list of All customers including details of the Last Sales date and number of days since they last bought from you, see our Customer Card List report.
- Filter on a Date Range to find Customers whose last purchase date was in that period or
- Filter on the number of Days since the customer last bought something
For more detailed reporting on Sales history and volumes try the following.
2. Report by Last Sales Date
While the Business Intelligence tool is designed to report on Actual sales made, by sorting your Customer Sales reports by Last Sold Date you can also create a report that quickly identifies regular customers who have stopped buying using the Analyse Sales & Margins Workbook:
- Run the Monthly Sales Report
This is a Pivot style report that runs over the past 12 months of sales history.
- Copy the Monthly Sales Report
- Edit new Report to ADD the Last Sales Date (by Month or by Day)
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Order by Customer Last Sales Date
This will order your customers based on their Last sales date with oldest at the top. By using the Monthly Sales Pivot as the base report you can also then see each customer's past sales volumes and buying patterns.
3. Pivot to see Monthly, Weekly or Quarterly Trends
Another way to see who has stopped buying over a longer period would be:
- Change this Monthly Sales report to a Customer Sales by Quarter (or Year or Week depending on how often your customers order from you but remember to expand the Sales Date Range to include prior years if doing by year).
- Order by Total Sales to sort your customers by the ones that have purchased the most or the least
- Export to Excel to sort by multiple Quarters to quickly highlight the Customers who have stopped buying or are buying less than before.
4. Compare Sales to any Prior Periods to Identify a Decline in Sales
To find customers that are buying less than before use Comparison style reports.
- Run the report - YOY by Customer - To Compare Sales by Customer
- The Standard Report compares
- YTD v YTD in the Prior Year -
Click a column header to Sort by the Variance column to find Customers buying less or more than they did in the comparison period.
- Click Edit button to change to other date ranges or to add more comparisons date ranges including Rolling 12 months or This month v Last month.
- Click on a Customer name to drill down to YTD Sales breakdown by Month or change the Drill down sequence to drill down to Items sold or Product groups/Brands
- Change the Analyze by field to Item Level or Brand etc to see a higher level view of Sales to help understand changes in client buying patterns.
6. Salespeople more Visual and prefer Charts?
Run Cool Charts to see how customers and products are performing over time.