Perfect Probability Pipeline

The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style? The 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 had it all - a weak V6, leaky doors, rear window louvers, coke in the spare tire, and stainless steel!

Just to be clear, I'm not linking the 'pipe' in pipeline to the extra-curricular profit pursuits of John DeLorean or the classic guitar licks of Jimi Hendrix.

What I am saying is that if you don't build some style into your pipeline, you'll be ignored like a Chrysler K-car.

In the last post, we learned how to create actions that help the user to focus their activity on the right opportunity. This time, we'll help them fine tune their forecasts.

That's some next level button!

One of the knocks on dashboards is that they give you some good information on what is or what was, but don't help you know what to do. In a sales organization, 'what to do' generally means pipeline management. A typical pipeline tab might look something like:

Nice and clean, right? Some good spot info along the top. The stacked bar chart is a nice histogram of your possible future revenue. Finally, some detail info at the bottom. The end user can click around, filter down to their territory, and see some good info. They are practicing 'data discovery' just like we want them to.

You sit back, proud of yourself, thinking, "You recognize the skills, so I don't want nobody calling me son or kid or sport or nothing like that." But there's some next level stuff going on slick, and I need to tell you something about all your skills. As of right now, they mean precisely... zilch.

The next level is to help your users get to actionable info and give them a reason to come back as often as possible. In this case, one click to show the opportunities that are close to close. For this, 'close to close' is defined as an opportunity that has an anticipated close date that is less than 30 days from today.

Better List Boxes

You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things, and then wonders why his life sucks? Well... that was me. Every time something good happened to me, something bad was always waiting around the corner. Karma. That's when I realized I had to change. So, I made a list of every bad report I've ever done and, one by one I'm going to make up for all my mistakes. I'm just trying to be a better analyst. My name is Mike.

# 48,408,730 on my list is creating boring List Boxes. Every dashboard out there has something like this:

While it's a useful tool and let's your users filter and experience Qlikview's associative power, it's really boring. And to top it off, that bold, blue caption bar screams, "I'm important!" As all faithful FortuneCookieBI fans know, screaming is only for actually important things, not for captions. See what I did there?

List Your Values

We all have our own set of values. Some value love. Some value money. But just so we're clear, in the righteous words of David Lee Roth, money can't buy happiness but it can buy a huge yacht that sails right next to it.

Some value knowledge, but fear that we can't gain it. Fear of our own personal El Guapo. In a way, all of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. (Shyness is my El Guapo) For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For our fearless leader, JD, being muy guapo is his El Guapo. For all of us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the analysts of MarketStar can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo! Which, translated from traditional Swedish means 'Qlikview'.

Why am I preaching values, you ask? Because I'm going to teach you how create your own list of values, or 'ValueList', if you will.

Twisting the knife in a useful pie chart

Some people think that pie charts will kill kittens and bring the downfall of western civilization. Some people (**deep breaths, be nice, serenity now, woosah**) love pie charts. Since my self control is only so strong, we won't mention 3D pie chart 'people'.

Everyone knows that I'm firmly in the first camp, but I'm nothing if not flexible and tolerant of other people's stupid viewpoints. Which brings me grudgingly to the fact that I've recently read a couple of posts that point out good uses of pie charts (Jorge Camoes & Francis Gagnon). The gist is that pie charts are good for part to whole comparisons. Please notice that 'part' is singular, not plural. Let's apply this to Qlikview.

You can't nullify machine guns and el Caminos

Someday I want to be badass enough to rescue a damsel in distress by shooting a machine gun from the hip while riding in the bed of an el Camino that's fishtailing through a dirt parking lot.

Until then, I'll have to settle for opening day of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and publishing awesome Qlikview tips. And being really, really, ridiculously funny.

I can't think of a clever way to tease this tip, but it will let you remove a value from a table, but still keep nulls. Here's the scenario:

We're displaying opportunity details in a straight table. One of the fields contains 'reasons for close'. One of those reasons is 'duplicate'. But since we want to show both open and closed opportunities that aren't closed because they're duplicates, we can't easily use set analysis since it won't gracefully handle the nulls.

To make this work, we'll create three variables, a calculated dimension and a button.

Maxed out

Today is Valentine's Day. Tomorrow you will be crushed by a 143,000 ton asteroid. It's worth almost $200 BILLION, so you should be able to rebuild your deck and get a new hot tub. Maybe even an name-brand Jacuzzi ! The only problem is that you only have a 1 in 3 Trillion chance of cashing in. Better if your house is bigger.

Movoto

While you're waiting, let's learn a new tidbit about the Max function.