Whether you work in B2B or B2C, getting a better understanding of customer or account transactions in sequence is core. Customer cohorts will show you how well you are doing acquiring new customers, but also do they conduct repeat business with you. Product sequence will help you identify which products are getting traction with your customers: are the sales for one product or for a category just first time trials or do customers come back for repeat purchases of the same product? Working with many references / SKUs, many orders and many customers will bring Excel down to its knees before you know it… You need a solution that can scale!
In this post, I will use Snowflake as a database and Tableau with its standard demo SuperStore data set, but this logic is applicable to any SQL database and any BI product really… First part will show how to easily distinguish new customers from repeat business; second part will show how to identify products within orders by their sequence, and that is less easy… Also, note that I chose to develop the necessary calculations in SQL, but there are certainly ways to perform those calculations in memory in Tableau with Table Calcs, but that is out of scope for today.
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