Sales - Which Customers have Stopped buying?

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 :

1. Snapshot of Customers by Last Sales Date or Days Since last purchase See how
2. List Regular Customers who have Stopped Buying See how
3. Quarterly / Monthly Trends : Customer Sales sorted within a sales period See how
4. Compare Periods showing decline See how
5. Decline in Moving Annual Totals See how

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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.

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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:

1. Run the Monthly Sales Tab
   This is a Pivot style report runs over the past 12 months of sales history and also shows the Last Sales Date.
   
   
2. 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. Save this as a New Favourite to use over and over again.
   
   

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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).
- Click on the most recent Quarter (or Year or Week) to sort your customers by the ones that have purchased the least in that specific period.
- Export to Excel to sort by multiple Quarters to quickly highlight the Customers who have stopped buying or are buying less than before.

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4. Compare Sales to any Prior Periods to Identify a Decline in Sales

To find customers that are buying less than before use a Compare Report.

1. Run the Favourite - Sales - Compare Sales by Customer
2. The Standard Favourite compares
   - MTD this month v MTD last month - with Variances
   - YTD ( 12 mths Rolling This yr) v YTD (12  mths Rolling Last yr)
3. Click a column header to Sort by the Variance column to find Customers buying less than they did in the  comparison period.
   
   
   
4. Click Compare icon to change to other date ranges or to add more comparisons.
   
   
   
   
5. Click on a Customer name to drill down to Items sold or Product groups/Brands
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. Change the Analyze by field to Item Group/ Brand etc to see a higher level view of Sales to help understand changes in client buying patterns.
   
   
   
   
   

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5. Use Moving Annual Total Sales report to Identify a Decline in Sales

Another way to identify customers that are buying less than before is to use the Moving Annual Total Sales Report.

1. Run the Favourite - Sales (Item) - Moving Annual Total Sales by Customer (MAT)
2. The Standard Favourite runs over the Rolling 12 months to Today's date
   For this report to work you will need to have 24 months of Sales History (not purged).
3. Click any column header to Sort by the Total Sales $ amount for that period.

4. Each month the figure for the new month is added to the Moving Annual Total (MAT), while at the same time the figure for the first month out of the previous twelve months is subtracted.
   

5. MAT is great for smoothing out lumpy sales volumes and for comparing trends to the same season in the previous year.
6. To see an Individual or Group of companies in more detail simply Filter for that Company then Analyse by Item or Item Group to see which products or Item types are going up or down.

6. Salespeople more Visual and prefer Charts?

Run Cool Charts to see how customers and products are performing over time.

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