Just off a very inspirational call with my sales leader. While I love focusing on strengths, one thing that does hold us back are our weaknesses. The ones that really matter I'd classify as blind spots. Just like when driving a car, there are other cars or obstacles that we should we be aware of but we just can't see.
I'm not saying you should instantly turn them into strengths or "fix" them. What you need is awareness, and adaptation to ensure you work with an understanding of your limitations.
It doesn't matter if you are an individual contributor or a leader, you will have something that hits you from somewhere and it will be worse because you didn't consider it.
As your role changes/develops, your blind spots might hold you back. Sometimes it is your overused strengths that actually become weaknesses.
For me, hard stats and metrics are a weakness. I'm not great at logging things, or getting others to log activities themselves. I feel like if everyone logs things in their own way, we end up with information that is hard to use or action on collectively. So often I ignore them and go with my gut instincts. I think it could be better if I work out how we could get better stats that get past the logging problem, but don't spend a lot of time on that.
I think if I did this better, we would have a lot more useful data for coaching, working to overcome other blind spots and obstacles and generally improve.
The trick is to know what they are, and adjust to recognize what you are weak at.
What do you feel your top 3 blind spots are? What could you do actively to mitigate the risks these present?
What are the most common blind spots for Sales Engineers?
Paperwork, Logging Activity, Selling, Talking money/commercials, Negotiating Success Criteria, Continually updating demos, Typical Demo Crimes, Being Proactive, Listening skills, Leading meetings, Going deep into technical, or staying high out of the weeds.
Whatever your blind spot, I'm sure you can work out some ways to lessen the impact. What do you think?