Our culture teaches us to focus on our weaknesses and then improve upon them. While practice is critical to improvement in some areas, author Benson Smith of the Gallup Organization believes it is more important to focus on your strengths. By turning your strengths into super-strengths, your valuable time can be spent in areas where you feel more comfortable.

Over the course of 40 years, the Gallup Organization studied 250,000 sales representatives and 25,000 managers. The results were published in the best-selling book, Discover Your Sales Strengths: How the World's Greatest Sales People Develop Winning Careers.*

According to Smith, "You do learn from your failures, but you learn an awful lot more from your successes." For the same reason, we use the phrase, "Keep your eye on the ball," rather than "Keep your eye on the strike zone." By focusing your attention on the ball, you greatly improve your chances of hitting it.

The bottom line is there are more ways to do something wrong than solutions to do it right. When success is achieved, the sales person must recognize the techniques that brought out his/her best qualities and use them as a foundation for a business model.

Consider some of these questions as you plan new sales strategies:

• Am I more comfortable in front of a group, or am I better one-on-one?
• Am I a better communicator verbally or in writing?
• Am I a better communicator on the phone or in person?
• Which makes me feel more pressured: prospects who just saw an ad and responded to it, or referrals who expect more?
• Are my presentations well-received when I work as part of a team, or do I get a better response from my audience when I'm presenting alone?