There are four fundamental approaches to appraising sales performance. The first is management by objectives. Key to this is setting objectives and performance is rated against the achievement of preset objectives. This is done by establishing goals and desired outcomes and then comparing actual results with goals. The second appraisal technique are ranking methods. While there are a variety of these techniques, the basic idea is that the manager ranks his sales professionals from best to worst on a particular criteria. The manager then rank salespeople into three categories: the top 20 percent, middle 70 percent, and bottom ten 10 percent. The bottom 10 percent are supposed to be moved out to make room for new performers. This particular approach is not without controversy and it can create severe morale problems. The essay method is where there is a fill in the blank for age performance criteria and the manager writes down the sales employees performance in detail. 360 degree reviews as we've already mentioned is a technique which is the systematic collection of performance data on an individual or group derived from a number of stakeholders like immediate supervisors, team members, customers, peers and even themselves. In fact, anyone who has useful information on how an employee does a job may be one of the appraisers. This technique is highly useful in terms of broader perspective, greater self-development and multisource feedback is useful. 360 degree appraisals are useful to measure interpersonal skills, customer satisfaction and team-building skills. This is frequently used in team selling situations. Finally, there are rating scales like the one illustrated in this slide. Rating scales consists of several numerical scales representing job-related performance criteria such as dependability, initiative, output, attendance, attitude and so forth. Answer options range from excellent to poor. All of the mentioned appraisal systems have pros and cons and no one system is considered better than others. Firms tend to use a variety of approaches such as rating scales with room for essay style comments.