The 80/20 Rule

If you are not familiar with the 80/20 rule, it goes like this:

80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers.

or

80% of your business comes from 20% of your sales staff.

Go ahead and examine those figures in your business and see if it holds true.

Let’s say you have 10 sales people and 2 of them are doing all the heavy lifting, 2 are paying their own way, but the other 6 are not.

How long are you going to keep those bottom 6?

Do they truly have the potential to pay their own way and become one of your top dogs?

Are you hanging on to them because you feel you need the “feet on the street” even though they aren’t cutting it?

And why aren’t they cutting it?

Is it a lack of training? A lack of ____________ that can be fixed?

Or is it time to trim the fat and become leaner?

Before you get rid of those that are struggling due to your lack of ____________, make sure you do an honest evaluation.

Then if you need to cut them loose, do it.

It will  may help you in the long run.

A company I used to work for did this a few years ago. We went from 25 to 6 on our sales staff.

The result was we reversed the 80/20 rule and then we slowly added 1 new salesperson at a time.

However over time, we noticed that the 80/20 rule had weaseled itself back into play.  Again we had our top performers and then the rest.

Do you have the courage to make the hard choices?