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.

Okay, you should have the hang of it.

Now make a strengths and weaknesses analysis for your company, and then do the same analysis for your three most active competitors. These are the companies that you run up against most often. You should know enough about those competitors to write an insightful, good lists. If you don’t, shame on you!

Now, while you think about all these strengths and weaknesses, get out there and sell something!

Next week, you will begin to develop sales objectives based on your assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.

A Year of Selling Profitably
By Harris M. DeWese with Jerry Bray
Employ techniques and tools that turn weekly sales meetings into energetic learning experiences, resulting in a more enthusiastic, more motivated, and more effective sales force. Understand how these techniques and tools required to build successful marketing, sales and, ultimately, profits, will help you achieve “A Year of Selling Profitably.” Click to order a copy.