In the world of today, with shrinking budgets and increasing expectations, focusing on the right things is more important than ever. Evaluating whether or not to engage with an account on an opportunity or a lead or not, or when you have decided to do so, having the guts and the will to re-evaluate and reconsider prior engagements is inevitable when pursuing a certain level of effectiveness.
Most often, these evaluations are done in an unstructured way. Every sales organization, sales manager or sales rep does it based on their own personal experiences, their sentiment of the day or how good the weather and dinner yesterday evening was (notice how I like exaggerating to make a point).
What the assessments functionality enables is to evaluate not not sentiment, but on facts, in a structured way. Answering the same questions, using the same criteria and scoring mechanism leads to more objective evaluations.
Assessments can be performed against:
- Customers e.g. evaluations to be ran in the beginning of fiscal year to estimate the potential for the upcoming year or customer satisfaction surveys to evaluate prior engagements
- Partners e.g. evaluations to be ran to check whether or not a partner qualifies for a partner program
- Leads e.g. lead qualification assessments
- Opportunities e.g. evaluations to find out, not just at the beginning of a new opportunity cycle, but when starting each new stage of the sales cycle to re-evaluate whether or not it makes sense to continue to pursue the opportunity. Hence the option to link assessments in the sales coach
How to set them up?
- log on to sales cloud as an administrator
- choose ‘Setup and Maintenance’ from the navigator
- search for business object ‘CRM Assessment Template’
This will lead you to a wizard to create or maintain assessment templates.
Create new Assessments
Assessments have to have a name and this is where they are named. Once deployed or activated, assessments can no longer be changed. They are frozen whilst they can be used in Sales Cloud.
Ratings
Ratings are the possible results of the entire assessment based on the score that will be calculated depending on the answers for the questions.
This step is just about setting up the list of possible outcomes as they are needed in the following steps.
Notice how in the example on top, the score of ’62’ results in an ‘Average’ overall rating based on the questions that were answered so far.
Questions and Responses
Here the list of questions for the assessment can be created with for each of the questions the list of possible answers and the score each of the possible answers.
Question Weights
Each of the questions have their own weight, they do not all have to be equally important. these weights will be taken into account on top of the question answers when calculating the final score.
Score Ranges
For each of the ratings we setup earlier, we now can specify the corresponding score range and the color as it will show up in the total score graph in the example on top.
Task Templates
Depending on the outcome of the assessment, depending on the final score, a set of tasks can be added on whatever you were running the assessment for. These tasks are grouped together in a task template. More on these task templates in a next post soon.
