Imagine knowing exactly which customers are driving the most revenue for your business.
These high-value clients aren’t just contributors to your sales—they’re essential to shaping your growth strategy, optimizing your marketing efforts, and strengthening customer relationships.
But here’s the catch: knowing your top customers globally is not enough. You need to dig deeper, segmenting by regions or countries, to truly understand their impact.
Identifying your top 5 customers based on sales within each region gives you a clearer, more actionable view of your business’s performance. This allows you to tailor your approach, focus on specific markets, and strategically allocate resources where they matter most.
In this blog, we’ll show you exactly how to pinpoint these top customers, why segmentation matters, and how leveraging tools like QuickBooks, Excel, and Power BI can provide the insights you need for smarter decision-making.
Let’s get started!
Why Identifying Top Customers by Sales Matters
Did you know that when businesses prioritize customer needs, they see a 60% increase in their earnings?
However, not all customers contribute equally to your bottom line. By focusing on your top customers, you can allocate resources more effectively, strengthen relationships with high-value clients, and even reduce churn by offering personalized solutions.
Segmenting this data by country or region adds another layer of depth to your analysis.
You’ll be able to see how customer behavior differs across geographic areas, helping you tailor sales strategies more effectively.
The goal here is simple: you want to find the top 5 customers based on sales for each specific country or region. This segmentation allows you to optimize strategies by targeting regional markets with precision.
The Problem: Limited Insights with a Global View
Often, businesses face a common problem. While it’s easy to generate a global list of top customers, that list doesn’t offer much in terms of regional insights. If you’re operating across multiple regions or countries, understanding who your top customers are in each specific area can unlock important trends.
For example, your top 5 customers in the US may not be the same as those in Europe or Asia. Without segmentation, you’re left with a global top 5 list that doesn’t reflect how customer performance varies from one market to another. This lack of granularity can hinder your ability to create region-specific strategies and promotions.
Desired Outcome
Identifying your top customers isn’t just about knowing who’s bringing in the most revenue—it’s about understanding where they are, and how they perform in different regions, and using that knowledge to fuel smarter business decisions.
You need to create a dynamic, segmented list that identifies the top 5 customers by sales within each specific country or region. This ensures that you’re not just looking at the overall picture but zooming in on the key players driving revenue in each market.
Additionally, you need to ensure the results remain accurate even as the regional hierarchy becomes more granular. Whether you’re breaking down data by countries, states, or even cities, the list should adapt seamlessly, reflecting the top customers at every level of detail without losing context.
By focusing on your top 5 customers across different regions, you’re not only sharpening your business strategy but also positioning your company for sustained growth and success in every market you operate.
Solution 1: Initial Measure Calculation
To begin identifying your top 5 customers by region, you need to set up the right calculations that ensure accurate ranking based on sales. Here’s how you can start with the foundational step of calculating sales amounts and filtering the top performers.
Calculating Total Sales Amount: The first step is to sum up the total sales amount for each customer accurately. This foundational calculation provides the raw data needed for further analysis. Use a simple DAX formula like:
| Total Sales Amount = SUM(Sales[Amount]) |
This formula aggregates sales figures across your entire dataset, giving you a clear view of each customer’s contribution to your business.
Ranking and Filtering the Top 5 Customers: Once you have the total sales amount, the next step is to rank your customers and filter out the top 5 based on their sales performance. The following DAX formula can help you achieve this ranking within the context of a specific region or country:
| Top 5 Customers = CALCULATE([Total Sales], TOPN(5, ALL(Customer), [Total Sales], DESC)) |
This formula ranks customers by sales amount and filters the top 5, ensuring you focus on the highest revenue-generating customers within the selected region.
Expected Output: Once the formulas are applied, you’ll get a clear, actionable list of the top 5 customers by country or region. The result should be displayed in an easy-to-read format, such as a table or chart, showing the top customers for each selected geographic area. This will allow you to identify regional leaders and adjust your strategies accordingly quickly.
With this calculation in place, you now have a powerful tool to visualize your top 5 customers in each region, setting the stage for more targeted strategies and focused decision-making.
Solution 2: Adjusting Calculation Context
- Utilizing ALLSELECTED for Accurate Context: When dealing with segmented data, it’s crucial to ensure that your calculations reflect the correct context, especially when multiple filters (like regions or countries) are applied.
By using the ALLSELECTED function in DAX, you ensure that your top 5 customer rankings are dynamically adjusted based on the specific region or country filter selected. This way, your results always align with the active context. Here’s an example DAX formula to achieve this:
| Top 5 Customers by Region = CALCULATE ([Total Sales], TOPN(5, ALLSELECTED(Customer), [Total Sales], DESC)) |
This formula ensures that only the top 5 customers in the currently selected region or country are considered, preventing any distortion from global data and providing region-specific insights.
- Example Calculation by Country: Let’s say you’re analyzing sales data for the United States and Canada. With ALLSELECTED in place, your report will dynamically show the top 5 customers for each country as you apply the filters.
For instance, if you filter to display only the United States, the formula will adjust and rank the top 5 U.S. customers. The same applies when switching to Canada, giving you a clear breakdown for each region without having to alter calculations manually.
This approach keeps your analysis flexible and ensures accurate reporting regardless of how granular the regional segmentation gets.
Further Solution Adjustments
To achieve the most precise customer insights, it’s important to refine your approach by combining both customer and geographical filters for a more accurate and context-aware analysis.
- Combining Customer and Geographical Filters for Precision: To ensure your analysis is both comprehensive and contextually accurate, it’s important to implement a combined approach that handles customer and geographical filters simultaneously.
By merging these two filters, you ensure that your top 5 customers are always displayed within the correct regional context, without overlapping data or losing critical insights. This combined approach makes sure that you’re getting the most accurate, segmented view of your customer performance across different regions.
- Iterative Adjustments for Seamless Results: Achieving an error-free, segmented display of the top 5 customers often requires iterative fine-tuning. You might need to make adjustments to the ranking formulas or the filter context to guarantee that your data remains accurate even as you zoom in on lower regional levels or apply additional filters.
By continuously refining the calculations, you can ensure that the top 5 customers are displayed correctly across all regions, offering a clear and precise picture without sacrificing filter context or missing key data.
Using QuickBooks and Excel to Identify Top Customers
Identifying your top customers is essential for targeted business strategies, and leveraging QuickBooks and Excel can help you easily uncover those key players driving your revenue.
- Customizing Reports in QuickBooks: QuickBooks offers built-in reporting tools, but to focus on your top customers, you’ll need to modify the reports. Start by navigating to the Sales by Customer Summary report, then customize it by applying filters for specific timeframes, regions, or customer types.
You can adjust the sorting to rank customers based on total sales, ensuring that the highest revenue-generating clients are displayed at the top of the list.
- Exporting and Refining Data in Excel: Once you’ve customized your QuickBooks report, export the data to Excel for more advanced analysis. In Excel, you can further refine the data by using filters, pivot tables, and formulas to segment customers by region, calculate their total sales, and easily identify the top performers.
This will allow you a more flexible and detailed review of your customer data, empowering you to dig deeper into regional insights and performance metrics.
By exporting your QuickBooks data into Excel and refining it, you gain deeper insights into your top customers, setting the foundation for smarter, data-driven decisions that can propel your business forward.
Using TOPN DAX to Identify Top Customers
To streamline the process of identifying your top customers, leveraging the power of TOPN DAX in Power BI allows for dynamic, automated rankings based on total sales, enabling you to focus on what matters most—your highest revenue-generating clients.
- Ranking Top 5 Customers with TOPN DAX: To automate the process of identifying your top 5 customers, the TOPN DAX function in Power BI is highly effective.
By ranking customers based on their total sales, you can quickly generate a dynamic list of your top clients. Here’s a DAX formula to help you get started:
| Top 5 Customers = CALCULATE([Total Sales], TOPN(5, ALL(Customer), [Total Sales], DESC)) |
This formula will arrange your customers and filter the top 5, giving you a clear view of your highest revenue contributors.
- Creating Visualizations in Power BI: After calculating the top 5 customers, Power BI enables you to turn this data into powerful visuals. You can use bar charts, tables, or even geographical maps to display your top customers by region, making it easy to visualize where your key markets are and how these customers are performing.
- Comparing Top 5 Customers Over Different Periods: To track performance changes over time, you can apply the same TOPN DAX logic to analyze top customers for different periods. Whether comparing year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter data, this method allows you to spot trends, measure growth, and gain valuable insights into customer retention and revenue progression.
By using TOPN DAX for customer analysis and visualization, you will gain real-time insights into your top customers and enhance your decision-making with a clear understanding of customer performance trends over time.
How Bunker Helps Boost Sales Insights
At Bunker, we understand the importance of tracking your top customers to improve cash flow and optimize financial management. Our powerful dashboards, including the AR and Cash Flow Dashboards, help you monitor key metrics like Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), overdue receivables, and monthly cash flow trends.
By providing a real-time view of your accounts receivable, Bunker allows you to quickly identify your top customers, improve collection processes, and ensure steady cash flow.
Features to Watch:
- Cash Flow Dashboard: Gain instant clarity on your business’s cash position with Bunker’s intuitive Cash Flow Dashboard. Within seconds, you can access a comprehensive month-on-month overview of your cash inflows and outflows, broken down by account and category.
Additionally, the working capital chart integrated into the dashboard allows you to easily pinpoint areas where cash is tied up—such as inventory, receivables, or payables—enabling more informed decisions for supplemental reporting and cash optimization.
- AR Dashboard: Bunker’s dedicated Accounts Receivables Dashboard provides an all-in-one view of your receivables performance. From monitoring top customers, to Day Sales Outstanding (DSO) to tracking total receivables, overdue receivables, and AR aging, this dashboard gives you the tools you need to stay on top of your cash flow health.
The interactive visualizations make it easy to identify overdue payments and aging trends, allowing you to prioritize collections. And with the ability to download or expand data effortlessly, you can analyze your receivables with unmatched flexibility, ensuring you’re always in control of your cash flow.
Identifying your top 5 customers based on sales is crucial for optimizing your business strategy. Whether you’re segmenting by region or comparing performance across periods, you can make this process efficient and insightful using tools like Bunker, Power BI, and QuickBooks.
Moreover, you can focus on your top customers to drive growth, improve financial health, and make smarter business decisions. Sign up for Bunker and start tracking your cash position and accounts receivables with real-time insights. Optimize your financial strategy and improve your bottom line—get started now!
