Sales Forecast Simulator - What if scenarios

An interactive Weighted Pipeline Simulator that lets sales leaders run what-if analyses on their CRM pipeline, showcasing how agentic analytics can transform forecasting and decision-making.

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🔥 Inspiration

Sales forecasting is often stuck in the past — static dashboards, manual exports, and endless spreadsheets.
We asked ourselves:

"What if a sales leader could **ask 'what-if' questions directly in Tableau Next* and instantly see the future impact on their pipeline?"*

That idea inspired us to build an Agentic Weighted Pipeline Simulator.

🛠️ How We Built It

  1. Data Foundation
    • We generated a synthetic CRM opportunities dataset (opportunities.csv) with 3,000 records using Python and Pandas.
    • Each record includes key CRM fields:
      • Region, Segment, Stage, Owner, Amount, Probability, Expected Close Date.
    • Formula for Weighted Pipeline:

[ \text{Weighted Pipeline} = \sum_{i=1}^{n} (\text{Opportunity Amount}_i \times \text{Probability}_i) ]

  1. Scenario Layer

    • Created a scenarios.csv with business-driven adjustments (e.g., increase SMB by +10%, decrease APAC Enterprise by -15%).
    • Joined with opportunities via a simple join_key to dynamically calculate Scenario Adjusted Weighted Pipeline.

  2. Visualization Layer

    • Built in Tableau Next with:
      • KPI Tiles (Total Pipeline, Bookings, Coverage Ratio)
      • Scenario-Adjusted Funnel
      • Trend Charts (by Expected Close Date)
    • Enabled scenario filters for region, segment, stage, and win rate adjustments.

💡 What We Learned

  • Agentic Analytics is more than AI — it’s about making insights conversational and predictive.
  • Tableau Next has the potential to go beyond BI dashboards into decision intelligence.
  • Synthetic datasets are a powerful way to prototype analytics solutions without access to sensitive CRM data.

🚧 Challenges We Faced

  • Data realism: Creating synthetic but realistic CRM opportunities required balancing probabilities and stage distributions.
  • Scenario logic: Designing the right adjustment rules that are simple yet representative of real sales planning.
  • Agentic gap: Tableau Next today is powerful, but bridging to Copilot-like interactions (natural language → filter → recalculation) still requires imagination and future work.

✨ Impact

This project demonstrates that the next era of analytics is agentic:

  • Leaders don’t just want to see what happened — they want to test what could happen.
  • By blending Tableau Next + Salesforce Data Cloud + Agentic Simulation, we’ve taken a step toward forecasting as a conversation.

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