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.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.