Strength Selling: How Identifying Your Innate Strengths Can Increase Sales Performance

Guest Post by memoryBlue Senior Account Executive, Michael Mishler

Americans spend billions of dollars each year on gym memberships. So much time and energy is spent improving one’s physical strength. Of course, staying in shape and being healthy is important. But why do we spend so much time increasing physical strengths and so little time maximizing our professional strengths and abilities?

Combine strengths and talent for success

A strength is a strong attribute or an inherent asset. When a person uses their strengths, they have the ability to consistently provide a seamless performance in a specific activity. Your talents are innate and unique to you, and leveraging them can improve performance. Developing your natural talents to focus into strengths will take hard work. However, the combination of your strengths, skills, knowledge, practice, and natural talents will culminate in a greater all-around performance.

To be more successful in sales, we must put ourselves in challenging situations…  

I strive to put myself in positions where I can continuously utilize and develop my personal strengths. I spent six years in higher education, receiving a bachelor’s in international business and a master’s in communication studies. During my undergraduate years, I focused on my strengths and what I was good at in order to be successful with exams and my presentations. While in graduate school, I further honed and leveraged those same strengths to be more effective in teaching freshmen. Each day in front of a classroom of 25 students, I would focus on my strengths in presentation techniques and communication styles to be a more effective teacher.

During the summers of my collegiate years, I sold books door-to-door in North Carolina and Tennessee for the Varsity Internship Program. My four summers of working 14-hour days for three consecutive months helped develop my talents and forced me to put my strengths into action. On those days when I was stuck outside in the summer heat and nobody would let me inside to make a presentation, I focused on positivity, which is one of my strengths. It was imperative to forget the past house where the man cursed me out and his dog chased me down the sidewalk. The next house offered another opportunity, but in order to be successful I needed a strong mental attitude and a positive approach. Because I persevered (another strength) and just kept selling, I became one of the top salespeople in the Varsity Internship Program, putting myself through school with a commission-only job.

Understand what kind of environment makes you thrive

Everyone is different. And finding the work environment in which you can grow is critical to focusing your strengths and increasing sales performance. Exceptional training, hands-on leadership, and the company culture at memoryBlue provide me with yet another opportunity to again use my talents to bring out my strengths. One of my strengths is being competitive and memoryBlue gives numerous opportunities for employees to compete individually and their coworkers. Company-wide competitions that reward the top performers with gift cards, iPads, happy hours, and tickets to professional sporting events are extremely motivating for people like me who live for competition. The training and hands-on leadership at memoryBlue provide an atmosphere for employees to hone their strengths and realize their potential.

Well-chosen opportunities have pushed me toward closing the gap between my actual performance and my true potential. Understand how you can bring your talents and strengths together to increase your performance.

Find out how you can focus on your strengths to boost your sales performance.