You want to find out if there are any customers whose pattern of behavior is changing, in particular, declining monthly sales (buying less products month on month). Firstly, you want to find out if there are any such customers.
Ensure the grid is in Period mode (click Mode > Period).
Click the Customer dimension to filter the data by customer.
You have over 13,700 customers, so you need to narrow down the list before you can find the pattern of behavior. You can filter the data in the grid by condition.
Scroll across to the November (current month) column and right-click > Nov 2022 LESS THAN > Oct 2022.
Now the grid displays only the customers whose sales in November were less than in October (the previous month). You need to filter a few more times to find the pattern.
Right-click the October column and click Oct 2022 LESS THAN > Sep 2022. Now the grid displays only the customers whose sales are in November < October and October < September.
Right-click the September column and click Sep 2022 LESS THAN > Aug 2022. Now the grid displays only the customers whose sales are in November < October, October < September, and September < August.
You now have filtered the data to display a list of 64 customers that exhibit the behavior you are concerned about. The filters you applied display in the header above the grid.
Next, you want to find out what products are involved.
Click the Item Class (Product) dimension.
Select the top two products and click the Focus button.
You can now see a summary of sales for those two products in a trend over time but now you want to compare each customer side by side across those products.
Select the two product rows and click the Matrix button.
Click the Customer dimension.
You can now see the customers with their total sales, along with the sales for each of the two products.
From here, there are several paths you can take, for example:
You can browse the records in the grid to find customers whose product mix is off. For example, if customers typically buy the same amount of each product but one product value is higher than the other, the sales values are out of balance.
You can look for movements. Click Mode > Matrix Variance. For those customers, you can now see what the total change is from this year to last year and what the change is within each product class. Scroll through the data to identify substantial movements. For example, there might be customers whose sales are up overall but down in one product class. There might be customers whose sales are down overall and most of the decline is from one product class.
You got some insights into the behavior of your customers, it’s time to take action. You have the opportunity to interrupt this declining trend in sales now before it is too late and you lose the customers. You might want to change the current sales strategy or implement other initiatives to stimulate sales.