Sales optimisation and Cohort analysis

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Achieving sustainable growth is one of the foremost concerns of modern businesses

One popular framework used by business people when analysing the impact on strategies aimed at improving revenue and achieving sustainable growth is the old chestnut of price and volume:



Source: Beautiful.ai

This works great, but one analysis I like to do is called cohort analysis. This really helps sharpen the focus and helps us zoom in on managerial actions that can move the dial. You can think of these as levers of value:

Source: Beautiful.ai

Cohort analysis in Tableau


With three, easily re-used formula, we can replicate a cohort analysis on new data sets with relative ease when we've deployed Tableau in our analytical toolkit:


// A fixed LoD to set the Customer Acquisition Date
[Customer Acquisition Date]
{FIXED [Customer Name] : MIN ([Order Date]) }

 // A fixed LoD to set the Customer Lost Date
[Customer Last Date]
{FIXED [Customer Name] : MAX ([Order Date]) }

 // One calculation that logically goes through the variations
[Cohort]
IF [Customer Acquisition Date] = [Order Date]
THEN "New"

 ELSEIF [Customer Last Date] = [Order Date] AND [Order Date] = {MAX ([Order Date]) }
THEN "Last"

 ELSEIF [Customer Last Date] = [Order Date] 
THEN "Lost"

 ELSEIF [Customer Acquisition Date] != [Order Date]
THEN "Existing"

 END


It's easier to visualise this, check this out on my Tableau Public profile:


Comments, recommendations, suggestions all welcome! Tweet me @izamryan

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