Considerations for Setting Up Assessment Templates

You can implement assessment templates to let salespeople analyze the health of a business object, such as a lead or an opportunity, and suggest appropriate next steps based on its diagnosis. To best plan and create assessment templates, you should consider the following points:

• Ratings

• Questions, question groups, and question weights

• Responses and scores

• Associated task templates

Ratings

A rating is a textual qualification, such as Excellent. There are three delivered ratings in the assessment template: Excellent, Average, and Poor. Ratings provide a metric other than a numeric score to qualify the outcome of an assessment. Ratings are created at the beginning of the assessment template creation process. They're later applied to possible responses to questions in the template, which associates each rating with a score. Ratings display an appropriate feedback based on the completed assessment score once you submit an assessment. When setting up ratings and applying them to possible responses, remember that ratings and their associated feedback text will eventually display as part of the overall assessed health of a business object.

Questions, Question Groups, and Question Weights

Questions are the main components of an assessment template. They're written to help in systematically determining the health of a business object, and are grouped into logical collections called Question Groups. Each question in the template is assigned a question weight. Question weight is expressed as a percentage, which is the relative importance of the question within the template. When you use an assessment template to perform an assessment, a question's weight is multiplied by the normalized response score given for the question to produce a weighted score for that question.

When setting up questions, question groups, and question weights, you must carefully analyze which factors determine the health of a particular business object (like a lead or an opportunity) in your organization. Use those factors to create your question groups; and then write three to five questions per group that are weighted according to your analysis. There's no limit to the number of questions that can be in a question group, but each question group must have at least one question.

Responses and Scores

Responses are attached to questions in the template. Each question should have at least two responses, unless it's a free-form only question. More than one response can be tied to the same rating. However, between all of its responses, each question should accommodate at least two ratings, unless it's a free-form only question. For example, if your ratings are Excellent, Average, or Poor, for each question you can include two responses that correspond to at least one of those ratings, such as average. There must be enough responses to cover at least two of the ratings, such as Excellent and Average. You assign a score to each response for a question, and the application normalizes the score based on a standard scoring scale.

When an assessment template is used to perform an assessment, a question's weight is multiplied by the normalized score of the response given for the question to produce a weighted score for that response. When adding responses to questions, ensure that the scores and ratings you assign to each response correlate. In other words, the higher the score you assign to the response, the higher the rating should be so that you have a strong quantitative relationship between the two. Also note that you can allow free-form responses for one or more questions in the template, but free-form responses are never scored.

Associated Task Templates

A task template is an instruction to generate a group of related activities. You can associate task templates with an assessment template to recommend tasks that should be performed after an assessment has been done for a business object. When you associate task templates with an assessment template, you can indicate a score range for each task template. Based on the total score of any assessment that uses your template, one or more task templates will be recommended as follow-up activities. For a task template to be available to associate with an assessment template, it must be assigned to the same business object type as that assigned to the assessment template, and it must have a subtype of Assessment. Ensure that you have set up task templates correctly before associating them to assessment templates.