Overview
A Sankey Chart is designed to highlight the movement of data across different segments. Unlike traditional charts—such as bar, column, pie, or donut—that mainly provide a static distribution of values, the Sankey Chart focuses on illustrating the flow between multiple segments or grouping fields. This makes it an ideal choice when you want to track how values (like lead counts, revenue, or deal statuses) move from one category to the next.
Imagine you’re a sales manager trying to get a better handle on your team’s performance and your company’s revenue pipeline. You want to understand not just how many deals are coming in, but also where the revenue is coming from and when you can expect those deals to close.
Let's say you want to know which lead sources are bringing in the highest revenue and how deals progress. You can create a Sankey chart for measuring the count of deals, and the flow of records is from the lead source to the deal stage. After analyzing which lead sources are bringing in the highest revenue and tracking how deals progress through the sales stages, you might discover that online marketing generates many early-stage deals while partner referrals, though fewer in number, yield higher revenue in later stages.
This insight helps you prioritize nurturing the most profitable channels.
Again, consider adding a time dimension to your analysis by incorporating the closing date. This chart visualization shows not only the revenue flow across lead sources and stages, but also when deals are expected to close.
You may discover that a particular lead source, though strong in revenue, has deals closing later, affecting your short-term forecasts.
This extra detail aids in managing cash flow and setting realistic targets.
Creating a Sankey Chart
To create a Sankey chart:
- Navigate to the Analytics module, and select a dashboard.
- Click Add Component, and select Charts.

- On the Add Chart page, do the following:

- Enter the component name.
- Select the Primary Module and the Related Module.
- Select an option in the Measure (Y-axis)
- Set two Groupings that you want to visualize from the list of available fields.
Add criteria if needed for the grouping. - In the top-right, you can select Sankey as the chart type using the drop-down list.

- Click on Create Category Field if you want to combine related values from the grouping field into categories.
This option is available when the selected grouping is a picklist or a numeric field. Learn more. - Click More Options to choose Sort by, Maximum grouping, Benchmark for y-axis, and Display as shortened numbers, Display Total Summary to show the total of the participating values (amount or quantity) for quick reference.
- Click Save.