In sales planning its very common to look at what is called 'whitespace', that is the customers where your company hasnt sold any of a particular product or category.  As part of the sales planning a sales team will target customers with whitespace to try and increase penetration into those customers.  In order to do this, there needs to be some analysis of the whitespace by account, territory, product category, industry, etc.

It's quite easy to create a simple whitespace report in CRM, that management and reps can use to view their territory.  An example of a simple one is shown below.

You can see it highlights based on the sales revenue in differing shades of grey, and shows by account and by product category the 'whitespace' where no product sales have been made.  In this case it filters by a rolling 12 months, but could be any range of dates.  A picklist across the top allows selection of a specific territory.

This report could be analysed by many different attributes, time, industry, postcode, rep, sale type etc.

A sales manager or rep can use this by visually seeing who are their biggest customers and what products they havent bought. In this case they can hyperlink from the report direct to the account, where they may plan out some calls with the customer to discuss those whitespace products.

How to write this report

These directions assume you are familiar with the CRM On Demand reporting tool.

1. Select the subject area 'opportunity-products', analytics (...History) or Reporting.

2. Select the essential columns;

• Account
• Product Category
• Revenue
• and other columns you may want
  • Industry
  • Owner
  • Territory

3. Add conditional formatting to the Revenue column, to show grey and icons

4. Create a hyperlink (HTML), in the account name formula. Cant be an ActionLink

5. Add a filter to select only 'closed/won' opportunities

5. Create a pivot table as shown in the image

Its pretty easy really and is so useful for sales teams.

Note:  this report will only show categories where at least one record is returned to the set, so it work well with large sets of data. In other words if only a small set of data (opportunities), it wont show whitespace for products that have not been returned in that set. For that you need a different approach.