What is the most effective way for a global company to visualize sales performance across different countries?

Using Amazon QuickSight with Amazon Athena as the data source, combined with heat maps as the visual type, is an effective method for visualizing sales performance across different countries due to several reasons.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that allows users to analyze data directly from Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It provides the flexibility to handle large datasets efficiently, which is essential for a global company that likely has significant amounts of sales data spread across various regions. By leveraging Athena, the company can query its sales data without having to set up complex data warehousing solutions, enabling quick insights and visualizations.

Heat maps, on the other hand, are particularly suited for comparing data across two dimensions, making them ideal for visualizing sales performance across different countries. They can help identify patterns, trends, and outliers in sales data, allowing decision-makers to quickly grasp where sales are strong or weak geographically. The color gradients in heat maps can convey a great deal of information at a glance, enhancing the interpretability of data.

The combination of Amazon QuickSight’s visualization capabilities and Athena’s data querying features creates a powerful solution that maximizes the effectiveness of the analysis, making it the most suitable option for the scenario presented.