Negative Sales Goals

[DanG]

Sounds weird huh?

I have a salesman that has a negative "Net Flow" goal (sales goal). Others have positive goals.

His YTD Net Flows (Sales) is say...$1062 (million) and his goal is "-266 million"
Of course he is doing quite well, when I use the following code to get a % to goal I get "0" whenever there is a negative goal involved.

% to Goal: IIf([NetFlowsGoal]>0,([Total Net Flows]/[NetFlowsGoal]),0)

But it works fine if all numbers are positive as you might guess.

Any pointers would be great...Thank you

 

[boblarson]

Try:

% to Goal: IIf(ABS([NetFlowsGoal])>0,(ABS([Total Net Flows])/ABS([NetFlowsGoal])),0)

 

[DanG]

Seemed to do the trick.

Thank you very much. I'm going to explore the ABS function a bit more, I know of it but not in much detail.

Thanks again!

 

[gemma-the-husky]

why not use <>, rather than just >

ie

% to Goal: IIf([NetFlowsGoal]<>0,([Total Net Flows]/[NetFlowsGoal]),0)

assuming you are happy with a negative %

 

[neileg]

Whatever the code, the underlying business event is the problem. Expressing a positive achievement as a percentage of a negative goal doesn't make a lot of sense.

I assume that the negative goal reflects the fact the the salesman's customer base is one that is expected to have declining sales revenue. The only way to to have a meaningful measure in this case is to express the achievement as a percentage of the underlying sales volume, not the target net position. Of course this won't be in line with other sales staff with positive targets. But that's statistics for you.