This is a typical data set exported from a Siebel Marketing Responses database. The pipeline.pjd project file contains opportunities together with the account name, industry, application, close date, total and expected revenue, probability, account manager, sales stage, and creation date.

Territory Management

What you see

Here you see the potential revenue per sales representative. Higher probabilities are set in green, and lower ones in red. As a sales manager, you can see anomalies in territories, or identify risks quickly. For example, Sam's pipeline seems extremely weak. Lawrence's, on the other hand, controls a lot of the division's pipeline. Isn't that risky?

You may want to sort the clusters by total revenue sum, or add a computed column revenue*probability, which will indicate the revenue you can expect from a sales manager. Sorting according to this column's sum will give you a reasonable estimate of each manager's probable revenue.

Sales Cycle Analysis

This 2D graph places the creation date on the X axis and the deal close date on the Y axis. The deal's revenue is mapped to width and height to emphasize large deals. Finally, the color is mapped to the Sales stage.

What you see

How long does it take to close a deal? What is the status of the opportunities with the biggest potential? The size of each dot represents the expected value, and the color represents the status. The higher up they appear in the graph, the longer they have been in the pipe.

This view could be used to spot differences in the sales cycle of products, sales reps, and countries, in order to develop specific tools to speed up the cycle where most needed, or at least to be more accurate in forecasting. On the left side, the same view is split by industry sectors. It reveals that the manufacturing sector is a good predictor of the overall sales cycle.

What is Sam Doing?

This is a regular parallel coordinate view.

What you see

Here Sam is doing a poorly in feeding deal information into Siebel. This might be a training issue, or a problem with Sam himself.

You may want to sort according to other columns, such as Industry, to view how your opportunities are spread in various categories.

Up to Data Sets.