Geographic or Industry Distribution - Measuring Success or Failure

A danger for all businesses, big or small, is the improper use of assumptions. It's easy to criticise the use of assumptions but it's a necessary evil for being able to make quick decisions and not delay. One critical assumption to track however and keep up-to-date is the key sources of our sales.

Sales Distribution:

I typically recommend using country or industry (as in the end market you sell into) as the indicator of sales location. See the picture below for an example of how this chart may look.

I find Excel "Data Tables" included in graph can help diffuse people wanting extra detail. It's a trade-off

Some key questions to ask could be:

Why is Smaller Country A outselling Larger Country Z so significantly?

Are we seeing a re-ranking in our key contributing regions?

Etc...

Most months dashboards and leadership team sessions will not revolve around reviewing this metric, but you should ensure to include it in quarterly reviews to drive home the current business state. If you have the opportunity to have someone interview or test your team on their understanding of where your key sales are derived from, you may find more variation in answer than you expected.

Make sure to integrate this metric into an overall metric dashboard to have it included and not be a separate review expectation for leadership. See here for a discussion on business dashboards.