You’ve then most likely spent considerable time training the remainder of your team, starting with your two most talented sales people and moved on with recruiting for some new recruits.

 Once you’ve finally built or rebuilt your team of superstars, (a lengthy process in many companies as we all know), what’s next for you to do?

Start looking for more sales people with the same qualities as your sales superstars. But even when. Even if you managed to put together a team of 10 or more superstars, a rare feat, there’s still going to be two sales people who are better than the others.

That’s the beauty of the 80/20 rule, and there’s no escaping it.

After all, the 80/20 rule—or the Pareto Principle—goes directly against modern Western thinking. We all like to believe that everyone should be treated equally. No life is more important than the other. All human beings are equal.

But are all of us made equal? No.

Give two persons a shovel, a gun, a pen, a chainsaw, or a computer, and one is bound to do better than the other. When it comes to doing jobs, people are very much unequal. Simply put, some are naturally better at doing certain things—more talented, if you want to call it that—than others.

If you want proof, go ahead and ask teachers what they think about the “No Child Left Behind” policy. The natural reaction would be to roll their eyes at you and point you toward the door. But some might go into detail how a pain in the ass it is to force a bad student to become average while the top students get everything right all the time without even batting an eye.

Most teachers absolutely hate this policy…as do great sales managers.

Because no matter how hard you try, every child is different, and the exact same thing applies to sales people.

It doesn’t matter how good you are as a sales manager, or how many years you’ve been in the sales industry, the 80/20 rule will almost always show up in every aspect of your business, whether you like it or not.

The trick is to not fight it. Instead, harmonize with it. Let sales superstars be sales superstars. About the rest of the team, continue to nurture their talents and abilities so they could start producing even better results.

Recall Jean’s key puncher story. Today Jean still holds the national record, while the rest of the people in her team averages about a third of what she accomplishes in a month, but still well above the national average.

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This time we’ll discuss a real-life example of how the 80/20 rule has helped a manager transform employees by focusing on excellence.

Here is the thing – top sales managers should have a knack for sensing sales people with real talent. They must have a good nose for it, the ability to smell a sales person’s determination to become excellent and above average. Without this, then the person is simply looking for another job to fill his or her time. No one wants to hire somebody who’s only looking for a paycheck.

Why is that? Because those kinds of employees are most likely underperformers. And top sales managers are aware that if they spend too much time on underperformers, they have less time guiding the good to become truly great.

Excellent sales people not only produce excellent results, they also serve as roles models for the entire team.

Jean’s story is a perfect example of how the 80/20 rule could elevate a company’s productivity beyond average.

In the data entry industry, the national performance average is 300,080 key punches a month, or 19,000 punches a day. Now a top sales manager, upon hiring new employees, ought to be able to raise his or her team’s productivity beyond this figure. But how much higher – 20%? 35%? 50%?

When Jean was first hired, she averaged 500,050 punches a month. Her talent was immediately recognized, and later she and her manager put together an individual goal to improve herself over the next couple months. Three months later she hit one million punches. Jean checked her profile and found she’s been averaging 100,012 punches a day. Even Jean was taken back at how well she was doing.

Again she and her manager got together to create a new plan. Jean clocked in with two million punches six months later. By then there was no doubt she’d become a role model in her company. One day her manager approached her and asked, “Why are you so good at this?”

Jean said, “I love my work. And whenever I make mistakes I just get more practice,” or something to that effect. Later Jean’s manager sat down and designed a hiring profile to find more people like Jean.

Today Jean’s personal best is 3,526,000 punches a month. The average of those working around her is one million key punches, more or less.

Jean had talent and personality. But she wouldn’t have been able to achieve this level of success without her manager, who carefully carved her from bare wood to become the standard of excellence she is today. The manager also designed the company’s hiring profile based on Jean’s performance.

That’s what top sales managers do. Top sales managers formulate their approach based on the talents of their best sales people. Unlike average sales managers, they don’t force square pegs into round holes. Instead they focus on their best resource at the moment, the 20% portion, build it up until it satisfies their definition of excellence, and then use that as a model for the rest, the remaining 80%, of the team to follow.

As a top sales manager, focus your attention on excellence, and spend less time worrying about the average.

Take it from Jean and her manager.

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But first things first – what exactly is the 80/20 rule? The 80/20 rule—or the Pareto Principle, named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto—states that 80% of effects is the result of 20% of the causes. For you this simply means that 80% of your sales will come from, roughly, only 20% of your sales people.

But when you apply the 80/20 rule in real life with the aim of becoming a top sales manager someday, you need to be prepared for the consequences.

For example, a good friend of mine who started a very successful business once told me a story about how the 80/20 rule could sometimes prove to be a double-edged weapon in real life. Famous as he was, this friend of mine collected thousands of followers on Twitter. But he only had time to follow a handful of people—20 or so, around that number anyway—which he deemed had actually something important to say.

Most took it that my friend was being a snob. Or was he?

Think about it. If you want to become a top sales manager someday, if you have dreams of being above average, you need to filter right here and now who and what you listen to. Not every piece of advice is worth gold. That’s what I meant when I said to apply the 80/20 rule in your life.

There will be lots of ideals, concepts and pieces of advice from different people trying to get in. But you don’t need all that noise in your life and in your career. As a general rule, you need to be constantly unsubscribing to stuff, and pick out only the ones worth listening to. Who you listen to, and what sort of advice would make a good impact on your career, is something you need to figure out on your own.

That’s what my friend is doing, and I’m pretty sure the kind of success he has achieved speaks for itself. There’s no need for him to listen to 10,000 fans chiming in every second. Call him a snob—okay, fine!—but remember that’s exactly the kind of attitude you need if you want to get anywhere in this business.

Just because a couple of your colleagues in the office think you’re a snob doesn’t mean you are. You are simple trying to live and breathe like a top sales manager. What are they doing?

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