Sales Funnel or Sales Process refers to a systematic approach to selling a product or service. [more on sales process]
Whether you run a small business or part of a large corporation, chances are, you heard about Sale Funnel. Understanding & analyzing your sales performance from a Funnel point of view is a great way to learn more about your sales processes.
About 2.5 years, we published an article on how to create Sales Funnel Charts using Excel. It shows, how you can tweak regular Excel bar chart to create a funnel chart.
Today, I want to show you a dead-simple way to create funnel charts using In-cell Charting Technique.
Take a look at the in-cell sales funnel chart:
Ready to make your own sales funnel chart? Well, lets get started then.
Step 1: Arrange your Sales Data
This is the easy part. Just arrange your sales process data in this fashion.
Step 2: Use an empty cell to define re-sizing factor
Since sales funnel numbers can be quite large, we need a way to reduce the numbers to meaningful size. I used 50 as my resizing factor (and entered this in cell C17). You can use 100 or 10 depending on your values.
Step 3: Generate In-cell Charts
In the column next to sales process numbers, we use REPT formula to generate In-cell charts. We will print | symbol ‘n’ number of times, where ‘n’ is sales process value / re-sizing factor.
For ex. this is the formula for first row:
Step 4: Change the font for In-cell Charts to “Playbill” size 11
The default Excel font (Calibri or Arial) produces an ugly looking in-cell chart. To fix this, we just need to change the font of in-cell chart cells to Playbill, size 11. (You can also use Script font, size 8 with Bold).
At this point, our funnel chart looks like a skewed funnel:
Step 5: Align Center to make the funnel chart
Now, just select all the in-cell chart cells & align to center. That is all. Our funnel chart is ready.
Download Sales Funnel Chart Template
Click here to download the sales funnel chart template & play with it. Go nuts analyzing your funnel or wowing at the simplicity of this technique.
How do you analyze your Sales Funnel?
Since I run a small business, understanding how my sales process works is important for me. However, since my sales process has only a few steps, I use ad-hoc funnel analysis. For example, I have these stages for my sales process:
- You visit Chandoo.org (casual visitor, possible thru search)
- You become a lover of Chandoo.org (loyal visitor, spends more than 15 mins per visit)
- You visit one of the product pages (designated sales pages)
- You click on purchase button (measured by the number of sales)
I do not track these at individual level, instead, I only measure the numbers at monthly aggregates and then do simple analysis like measuring conversion %s to see if everything is alright. Also, quite often, regular visitors of Chandoo.org convert to customers only after visiting us for a few months.
What about you? How do you analyze your sales funnel. What kind of charting techniques you use? Please share using comments.
