Poll of Sales Force Opinion
In the poll of sales force opinion method, often tagged “the grass-roots approach,” individual sales personnel forecast sales for their territories; then individual forecasts are combined and modified, as management thinks necessary, to form the company sales forecast.
This approach appeals to practical sales managers because:
- Forecasting responsibility is assigned to those who produce the results.
- Furthermore, there is merit in utilizing the specialized knowledge of those in closet touch with market conditions. Because the salespeople help to develop the forecast, they should have greater confidence in quotas based upon it.
- Another attractive feature is that forecasts developed by this method are easy to break down according to products, territories, customers, middlemen, and sales force.
But the poll of sales force opinion approach has weaknesses.
- Not generally trained to do forecasting, and influenced by current business conditions in their territories, salespersons tend to be overly optimistic or overly pessimistic about sales prospects.
- They are too near the trees to see the forest — they often are unaware of broad changes taking place in the economy and of trends in business conditions outside their own territories.
- Furthermore, if the “forecasts” of the sales staff are used in setting quotas, some sales personnel deliberately underestimate so that quotas are reached more easily.
- To some extent, the weakness of this method can be overcome through training the sales force in forecasting techniques, by orienting them to factors influencing company sales, and by adjusting for consistent biases in individual salespersons’ forecasts.
For most companies, however, implementing corrective actions is an endless task, because sales personnel turnover is constantly going on, and new staff members (whose biases are unknown at the start) submit their forecasts along with those of veteran sales personnel with known biases. In short, this method is based to such a large extent on judgment that it is not appropriate for most companies to use it as the only forecasting method. The poll of sales force opinion serves best as a method of getting an alternative estimate for use as a check on a sales forecast obtained through some other approach.