Great article from SellingPower.com titled Don’t Fix Weaknesses; Build Strengths that discusses salesperson development. The core tenet of this article is to focus on building strengths and not in transforming weaknesses into strengths (it won’t happen). The entire article is worth the read, but this is the pull quote for me (my emphasis):
In fact, while talent will get you to a certain point, developing and strengthening that talent is what brings the greatest success. Consider this experiment, conducted by the University of Nebraska some years back. To study the effectiveness of its speed-reading courses, the school evaluated students€™ natural reading pace and placed them in one of two groups €“ naturally fast readers and naturally slow readers. After the course, students were re-evaluated. The slow group improved from reading an average of 90 words per minute (wpm) to 150 wpm, a 67 percent increase. But the fast readers skyrocketed from an average of 350 wpm to more than 2,900 wpm, a 728 percent increase! The principle applies across the board to talent €“ when you work on areas in which someone has no natural ability, the improvement will be modest. But when you focus attention on building natural skills, the results will be off the charts.
Absolutely spot on. The best approach is to refine talents into skills – in sales, that leads to top-level performance. The key to reaching this level is to only focus on neutralizing weaknesses. As you will read in the article, many managers hope to make salespeople strong in their weak areas. Strike that thought from your mind!