Prosell and the effectiveness of appraisal systems

Prosell has been researching the effectiveness of appraisal systems and has found that, surprisingly, 72 per cent of the companies surveyed doubted that appraisals improved business performance.

Based on their feedback, eight common factors have been identified that undermine appraisal systems’ ability to contribute towards the achievement of business goals. The identified factors included:

· Objectives measured by the appraisal system are at odds with day to day priorities

· Appraisal systems only exist at staff and first line management levels but tend to be ignored further up the hierarchy

· Incoming managers not being made aware of performance development plans and commitments to team members

· Directly linking appraisals to remuneration and salary reviews

In spite of these issues, the research shows that employees like and want an appraisal process because they wish to discuss goals, objectives and training requirements.

FORECAST your way to better qualification

For many salespeople determining what stage of the sales cycle has been reached and deciding whether a particular campaign will be successful is often a ‘hit or miss’ affair based primarily on ‘gut feel’. Consequently, whilst ‘gut feel’ is important, qualification and forecasting are often inaccurate. This does not need to be the case as there is a more structured approach available.

Prosell has developed an eight point checklist to qualify sales opportunities. These eight areas can be conveniently packaged under the mnemonic FORECAST as follows:

Finance

• Is budget allocated or being sourced?

• Are there quantifiable financial benefits?

Originality

• Is our solution unique?

• Does the prospect see our USPs as worthwhile?

Return on Effort

• Is the size of the deal worth the work required?

• Is there long-term potential in the account?

Explicit Needs

• Does a genuine need exist?

• Is there a compelling event?

Competition

• Which competitors are involved?

• Is anyone favoured?

Authority

• Have we identified the decision makers?

• Do we have access to the right people?

Solution

• Do we have a viable solution?

• Has our solution been accepted?

Timeframe

• Has a decision date been set?

• Has an implementation date been set?

The FORECAST qualification process has two parts - firstly to ‘test the temperature’ of the opportunity and secondly to analyse the work needed to win it.

It is this second part which is the most important. After you have worked out the sales activity needed to win the sale, you are then in a far stronger position to decide whether or not to continue. This means that you have objective criteria to decide if you will continue with the campaign or that the chances of winning are slim and that you should ‘qualify out’ in order to concentrate on a better opportunity.

FORECAST incorporates a very simple ‘scoring’ mechanism to acid test the opportunity. Each of the eight criteria are examined in turn and given a score depending on the answers to the questions asked. The scoring works as follows:

1 = There is no more work to be done in this area

-1 = There is a problem in this area and a lot more work to do

? = You do not yet know something fundamental about this area so there is more work to do

The ‘score’ tells you what areas you need to work on in order to move the campaign forward to a close, i.e. the areas scored as either ‘?’ or ‘-1’ indicate where you need to do further work to increase the chance of success.

Feel free to adapt FORECAST to your organisation to help you avoid wasted sales time and improve forecast accuracy.

About Prosell

Established in 1985 and with offices in London and Sydney, Prosell is a performance improvement specialist focussed on developing the quality of execution in sales and customer service interactions.

Our extensive knowledge of both business and consumer markets has helped to define services which create and deliver sustainable, quantifiable improvement for our clients.

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