obviEnce is an ISV (Independent software vendor) and an Intellectual Property (IP) Incubator focused on Microsoft Business Intelligence. obviEnce works closely with Microsoft to develop best practices and thought leadership for jump-starting and deploying Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions.

🔰Introduction

Lately, when learning about sales insight and reporting, I have seen some sample datasets of Microsoft’s Power BI training. One of them is this “Sales and Marketing” dataset, presented in Excel Pivot Table. Once, I had an idea to show a report based on Excel, showing the analysis of sales through one of the biggest recession trends - The Great Recession, which started in 2008.

Following are a few highlights from my review of this sales dataset, let’s take a look:

• Revenue increased rapidly before the economic crisis, then slowly recovered but was not as good as before
• The rate of revenue-generating of each segment has not changed much whether before or after the crisis
• VanArsdel is still the industry with the highest revenue whether before or after the crisis
• Revenue, market share, and sentiment score do not have a covariance relationship, the highest sentiment score does not mean the highest revenue and the highest market share does not lead to the highest revenue
• Top sentiment scores belong to industries with low or average revenue in the region
• Revenue usually decreases in July every year due to objective reasons, one of which is bad weather.

🚀Let’s dive into the details!

Total sales from 2006 to 2008 reached over $600 million, the highest was in 2006 with more than $634 million. This number decreased significantly in 2009 - to just over $435 million, this number decreased by 27.64% YoY affected by the Great Recession started from December 2007 to June 2009.

Overview of revenue over time

VanArsdel has total revenue exceeding $3 billion until now, and accounts for nearly 22.9% market share, but is still ranked 2nd behind Natura with a market share of nearly 28% although revenue is only over $1.2 billion, about half the size of VanArsdel.

VanArsdel was the industry that had the highest revenue over time