Assessing Your Strengths and Weaknesses

(Blog #14 in the ongoing series derived from a book Harris DeWese wrote several years ago—“A Year of Selling Profitably.” The book was written for printers to use as a guide in training their sales teams through a series of two-hour sessions over 48 weeks.)

Man! This blog writing is hard work. It seems the readers expect me to come up with something substantive with every new blog that I write.

I tried to get that lethargic worthless Mañana Man to give me a hand and write some of these blogs. At the mere suggestion of work, that lazy coot ran off to hide in one of my sheds.

I’ll have to do it myself.

Where were we? We were working on personal sales planning.

Planning is difficult. It’s tedious hard work. It wears me out just thinkin‘ about it. It works best when you follow certain steps, and our next step is listing your personal sales strengths and weaknesses. Use and sheet of paper or a computer screen in Excel or Word.

On the left, type or write the word “Strengths.” On the right, write “Weaknesses.” It’s vital that you are honest with yourself. No one else is going to see this unless you are an egocentric liar with a long list on the left and nothing on the right.

Your strengths and weakness analysis could look something like this:

Strengths
• I am personable.
• I have good technical knowledge.
• I am a good closer.
• I am good at time management.
• I am substantive.

Weaknesses
• I oversleep.
• I am overweight.
• My spouse says my hair looks awful.
• I don’t get along with my co-workers.
• I don’t have a prospect list.
• I am losing customers and don’t know why.