01
How do you evaluate a marketing campaign's ROI?
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ROI = (incremental profit - campaign cost) / campaign cost. Measure incremental sales using a control group or before-after comparison.
Business Analytics Interview Questions for Lead Roles (₹20–25 LPA)
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02
What is the difference between SQL and Excel for analysis?
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Excel suits small to medium data and quick ad-hoc work; SQL queries large databases directly and repeatably.
03
A bank wants to reduce customer churn. What would you do?
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Define churn, analyse who leaves and why, segment customers, find drivers through data and surveys, design retention offers and measure uplift with a control group.
04
What is a SWOT analysis?
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A framework listing internal Strengths and Weaknesses and external Opportunities and Threats to assess a project or business position.
05
How do you analyse variance between budget and actual?
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Variance = Actual - Budget, shown as amount and percentage, with conditional formatting to flag large gaps and comments on the drivers.
06
How do you find duplicate customers?
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SELECT email, COUNT(*) FROM customers GROUP BY email HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;
07
BRD vs FRD?
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A BRD states what the business needs and why. An FRD details how the system should behave to meet those needs (functional specifications).
08
How would you measure the success of a new feature?
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Define a goal metric, a baseline and guardrail metrics, run an experiment or before-after comparison and review adoption, retention and revenue impact.
09
What is a process flow and which tools do you use?
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A diagram of steps, decisions and owners in a process, made using BPMN or flowcharts in tools like Visio, Lucidchart or draw.io.
10
What are fixed costs and variable costs?
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Fixed costs stay constant regardless of volume, such as rent; variable costs change with volume, such as raw materials.
11
What are the 4 Ps of marketing?
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Product, Price, Place and Promotion, the levers a business uses to bring an offering to market.
12
What is Kano model in prioritisation?
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A model classifying features as basic, performance or delight attributes based on how they affect customer satisfaction, helping decide what to build first.
13
What is a data table in Excel?
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A what-if tool that recalculates a formula for different inputs, for example loan payments across different rates and tenures.
14
What does GROUP BY do and how is HAVING different from WHERE?
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GROUP BY aggregates rows by column; WHERE filters before grouping and HAVING filters after, using aggregate conditions.
15
What is a KPI tree?
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It breaks a top metric into drivers: Revenue = Users × Conversion × AOV; Users = New + Returning, and so on. It shows which lever to pull and where a drop came from.
16
How would you decide whether to launch a new product?
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Assess market size and demand, customer need, competition, unit economics, capabilities, risks and strategic fit, then test with a pilot before scale-up.
17
What is Agile and how does Scrum work?
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Agile delivers value in small increments with feedback. Scrum organises work in sprints with planning, daily stand-ups, review and retrospective, led by a Scrum Master and Product Owner.
18
Guesstimate: how many cars are sold in India every year?
Show answer
Structure it: households × car-owning share ÷ replacement cycle + first-time buyers + commercial fleet. State each assumption clearly and sanity-check the final number.
19
SQL: top 5 customers by spend.
Show answer
SELECT customer_id, SUM(amount) AS spend
FROM orders
GROUP BY customer_id
ORDER BY spend DESC
LIMIT 5;
20
How do you handle large datasets in Excel?
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Use tables, Power Query, remove volatile functions, filter before calculating and move to Power Pivot or a database when rows reach the millions.
21
What is a use case diagram?
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A UML diagram showing actors and the actions (use cases) they perform with the system, giving a quick view of scope.
22
KPI vs metric?
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Every KPI is a metric, but a KPI is tied directly to a strategic goal (e.g. monthly churn). A metric can be any measurement (e.g. page views).
23
A food delivery company's orders fell 15%. How do you investigate?
Show answer
Check data accuracy, then segment by city, restaurant, time and user type; look at supply, delivery time, pricing, competitors and seasonality before proposing fixes.
24
Write a user story with acceptance criteria for password reset.
Show answer
As a customer, I want to reset my password by email so that I can get back into my account.
Acceptance criteria:
• Reset link expires in 15 minutes
• Password rules are shown while typing
• A success message appears after reset
25
How do you create a dashboard in Excel?
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Prepare clean data, build PivotTables and PivotCharts, add KPI cards and slicers, and arrange everything on one sheet with a clear layout.
26
How do you handle NULL values when calculating averages?
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AVG ignores NULLs; use COALESCE(col, 0) if NULLs should count as zero, depending on the business meaning.
27
How do you manage conflicting requirements from two senior stakeholders?
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Clarify the underlying goals, present data and trade-offs, facilitate a joint session, escalate to the sponsor if needed and document the agreed decision.
28
What is a user story and what makes it good?
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A short requirement written as 'As a user, I want X so that Y', backed by acceptance criteria. Good stories follow INVEST: independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small and testable.
29
What is a CTE?
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A named temporary result introduced with WITH that makes long queries readable and reusable in the same statement.
30
Tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder.
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Use STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Show that you listened, found the underlying goal, used data to align people and reached a documented decision.
31
What is a RACI matrix?
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A table assigning Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed roles per task so ownership is clear.
32
What is the difference between revenue and profit?
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Revenue is total money from sales; profit is what remains after subtracting all costs and expenses.
33
What is a stakeholder analysis?
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Identifying everyone affected by the project and mapping their influence and interest to decide how to communicate with and involve each group.
34
How do you build a PivotTable to analyse sales by region and product?
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Create a table, insert a PivotTable, drag region to rows, product to columns, sales to values, and add slicers for month or channel.
35
What is SQL and why do business analysts need it?
Show answer
A language for querying databases. BAs use it to pull data themselves, validate numbers, check reports and answer questions without waiting for engineers.
36
How do you chart a trend with a target line?
Show answer
Create a line or column chart of actuals and add the target as another series formatted as a line.
37
Use case vs user story?
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A use case describes the full interaction between an actor and the system (main and alternate flows). A user story is a short statement of need from the user's point of view, refined with acceptance criteria.
38
Which what-if analysis tools does Excel have?
Show answer
Goal Seek (find the input for a target output), Data Tables (see outputs for many inputs) and Scenario Manager (save best, base and worst cases).
39
What is the difference between COUNT(*) and COUNT(column)?
Show answer
COUNT(*) counts all rows; COUNT(column) counts only rows where that column is not NULL.
40
What is Power Pivot?
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An Excel add-in for building data models with relationships and DAX measures over millions of rows, beyond normal worksheet limits.
41
What is the profit equation and how do you use it in cases?
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Profit = Revenue minus Cost, where revenue = price x volume and cost = fixed + variable. Split each part to find which one explains a change.
42
How do you use Excel's Scenario Manager?
Show answer
Define named scenarios such as best, base and worst with different input values and compare the outputs in a summary report.
43
What is the 80/20 rule in business analysis?
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Pareto principle: about 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes, such as most revenue from a few customers or most defects from a few issues.
44
How do you validate data before analysis?
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Check row counts against the source, nulls, duplicates on keys, value ranges, date coverage and that totals reconcile with finance reports.
45
Do a quick SWOT analysis for an ed-tech company.
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Strengths and Weaknesses are internal; Opportunities and Threats are external. Example: S = strong faculty, W = low brand awareness, O = AI upskilling demand, T = free online content.
46
How would you estimate the market size for an electric scooter in India?
Show answer
Top-down: two-wheeler market x EV share x addressable segment. Bottom-up: target households x adoption rate x price. Compare both for a sanity check.
47
How would you analyse the declining sales of a retail store?
Show answer
Break sales into footfall, conversion and average basket, compare with last year and competitors, and check stock, pricing, staffing and local events.
48
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
Show answer
The smallest version of a product with enough features to deliver value and gather real user feedback before investing more.
49
How do you calculate monthly revenue growth in SQL?
Show answer
Aggregate revenue per month and use LAG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY month) to compute (revenue - previous) / previous.
50
What is a market entry strategy case?
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Decide whether and how to enter a market by evaluating attractiveness, competition, capabilities and entry mode (build, buy, partner), then risks and next steps.
51
What does a Business Analyst do?
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A BA bridges business and technology: gathers requirements, analyses data and processes, documents BRD/FRD and makes sure the final solution actually solves the business problem.
52
What is customer lifetime value?
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The total profit expected from a customer over the relationship, roughly average margin x purchase frequency x lifespan, compared with acquisition cost.
53
What is a feasibility study?
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An early assessment of whether a proposed solution is technically, economically, operationally and legally viable before committing budget.
54
How do you estimate the annual revenue of a coffee shop chain?
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Number of outlets x daily customers x average bill x operating days, then validate using footfall, peak hours and similar chains.
55
Agile vs Waterfall?
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Waterfall runs fixed phases one after another with requirements frozen early. Agile delivers in short sprints with continuous feedback, so requirements can change. In Agile, BAs maintain the backlog and user stories.
56
What are aggregate functions?
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Functions that summarise rows into a value, such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN and MAX.
57
How do you handle changing requirements?
Show answer
Log the change, assess impact on scope, cost and timeline, get approval through change control or backlog grooming, and update documents and stakeholders.
58
What is the use of the IFERROR function?
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It returns a custom value when a formula errors out, keeping reports clean, for example =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...), "Not found").
59
Guesstimate: how many cups of tea are sold in Delhi per day?
Show answer
Population about 20 million, adult tea drinkers about 50%, cups bought outside per person around 1 on average. This gives roughly 10 million cups, then adjust for offices and stalls.