5 Tips To Identify Your Sales Employee Strengths And Weaknesses

A major factor to sales success is being able to use each sales employee’s strengths to contribute to the overall sales productivity of the organization. To be more clear, evaluating sales employees’ strengths and weaknesses can help you thrive your sales toward efficiency and success, as well as provide material for employee performance reviews. 

Once you identify and understand each sales employee’s strengths, you can place them in works in which they can make good benefits and steer performance. Also, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your sales employees will help you build more efficient sales teams by putting together employees with complementary skills to cover all of the needs of the sales. In addition to sales skills, inventory your sales employees using bases such as leadership, hard work, effective communications, time-management skills, and much more.

Tips For Identifying Your Sales Employee Strengths And Weaknesses

Performing Sales Employee Assessments

A sales employee assessment is an evaluation process where sales managers and individual sales employees meet together to discuss the overall sales productivity made, performance, sales targets achieved, and career development. In most cases, sales managers conduct sales performance assessments once per month or on weekly basis too. Various elements you can include in a sales employee assessment tool include overall performance, the ability to reach goals, and what individuals feel they need to improve. 

As we know, identifying sales employees’ strengths and weaknesses is the prime step to increasing sales efficiency at work. Each employee brings different skills and abilities to work and some may not be used currently but can be once you identify them. Some common employee strengths include loyalty, hard work, flexibility, excellent verbal communication, creativity, thinking outside of the box, strong interpersonal skills, and more. Make a list of your sales employees’ strengths and weaknesses and give them tips to overcome their weaknesses and improve their strengths.

Communicate With Your Sales Employees Freely

To know your sales employee’s strengths and weaknesses, it is necessary to build strong and trustworthy communication among employees. The more an employee trusts you, the more likely they are to come forward and communicate with you on their strengths and weaknesses. A great way to lay that foundation is to establish a rapport with your employee first. In a working environment, it is mindful that we try to know about each other’s strengths and weaknesses. So, that we can have a clear view of what they can do and also where they need training. 

By understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses, it’s easier to have effective communication in the workplace. Also, don’t focus on employees’ weaknesses that can’t be fixed readily but instead offer appreciation for strengths and encouragement for areas that can be improved. Let your sales employee know what you see as their strengths, how they have helped in sales productivity, and ways in which they can use their strengths to make new sales prospects and benefit the company in the future.

Arrange Competitions Within Teams

Arranging competition within teams is a great way to bring out the best sales in employees. It is an effective motivating factor and can qualitatively and quantitatively identify the strengths and weaknesses of the sales employees. Placing competitions within teams and across companies can be an entertaining and effective way to see who is a natural leader and who excels in their strengths in certain areas and who needs improvements. Also, a friendly competition promotes teamwork, which in turn will help increase overall team productivity in the long run. One of the major advantages of arranging internal competitions within the workplace is to help employees to think outside of the box by directly or indirectly revealing their strengths and the things they lag in. However, when there is competition at stake, employees often strive to create new and improved processes, technology, and solutions.

Set Up A Peer Mentoring Program

A frequent peer review program allows sales employees to identify their own strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of their peers. Since this evaluation will be done by their sales managers; someone they routinely engage at work and can expect a more accurate skill assessment. For the first few training months, make sales employees focus on their sales skill development, rather than on the more complicated works like generating leads. As said, nothing builds confidence more than improving their interpersonal skills, and these early personality improvements will help sales employees in identifying the strengths they have to work on in the initial stages. The process of peer to peer mentoring program can be accomplished through Software like Lystloc. Some organizations may design their peer review process in a way that incorporates all approaches, or they can choose only those they find applicable to their sales employees.

A SWOT Analysis 

SWOT analysis considers a sales employee’s Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Conducting a separate SWOT for each of your sales employees will help you to get proper knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses and identify their training and development needs. The SWOT analysis for sales employees is mainly conducted to understand and evaluate their individual strengths and weaknesses. For that, an employee should note down all of their strengths and weaknesses during this process of the SWOT analysis. They can either physically write down or use available software, which can be ordered and downloaded online. The key for evaluating strengths is comparing individual skills versus other employees of the same pay grade and can upgrade them in the future by training and development. In any situation, when evaluating strengths and weaknesses, you have to take it with a pinch of salt. Employees will usually overstate their strengths while downplaying their weaknesses, but it’s not a big deal as it’s human nature to do so.  This only emphasizes the importance of open discussions and knowledge sharing within the team and conducting truthful surveys and assessments.

Wrapping Up

Generally, many of the sales managers make the blunder of placing sales employees into a role without even considering the fact of how they could most effectively benefit the organization. When you’re hiring for a sales position, it shouldn’t be a “one size fits all” process. It’s crucial to take time to evaluate the employees you’re bringing on board. Try to learn about their strengths and interests in order to utilize them most effectively in the right way. 

From a sales manager’s perspective, identifying strengths and weaknesses is the key to unlocking the potential of every sales employee and every sales team. This information enables managers to make smarter decisions about sales work assignments, deliver more effective performance reviews, and ensure that every sales employee can grow and succeed within the organization.