Top Sales Manager Blog

The 80/20 rule—or the Pareto Principle—tells us that our best results, 80% of productivity, would come from just 20% of our efforts. As a top sales manager, how do you work around this knowledge so that your team of 10 sales people could improve itself to be on par with your two best sales superstars?

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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Filed under: Leading, The 80-20 Rule by ralphburns