As a supervisor or an individual that is leading teams, where do you spend most of your time and efforts improving your team members? Who do you focus on? What are you looking to achieve with your training tactics.
The Pareto Principle states that training needs to focus on the 80/20 rule. You need to focus on the 20% percent of the sales that brings in 80% of the business. However, when I work with clients, they have this all backwards.
When I meet with teams and review their training strategies, many managers leave their top performers alone and focus on the bottom performers in their groups. This would be like Tom Izzo or Coach K spending all their efforts on the walk ons and not working to better their NBA draft prospects.
So many managers that I talk to are leaving their top sales team members alone because they are meeting their goals and sales quotas and focusing their time and effort on those that are not. They are in fact doing the opposite of the 80/20 rule. They are focusing 80% of their time and resources on 20% of their team’s revenue and performance. In the end, that 80% of effort is going to quit or get fired while the top tier will continue to “be left alone”.
Maybe the top individuals in the company or team need to be pushed and challenged. Maybe they are the ones that need to go to sales training or have a consultant like me work 1:1 with them. Are they great at what they do, yes! But imagine if they become one of the best ever? What would that mean to them or you or the company to see your top performers perform even better?
The focus of the companies’ efforts needs to be on the top one or two or even five percent of salespeople or company team members. Law firms give their best upcoming lawyers the toughest cases as they know they can handle it. The rest of the incoming lawyers get the busy work and sit in the background. The firms focus on those who will have the highest billables and make partner the quickest. They train them and focus on how to make them better individuals for the firm.
If Tom Izzo or Coach K were to only focus on their walk ons, would they have won as many games and championships that they have? Now, I am not saying that they do not work with their bench players as they need to continue to develop talent throughout the team. However, they also leave a lot of that development to their assistance coaches or others so that they can focus on the important tasks at hand. Developing a process to bring others up to speed is critical but should not be the focus of the leadership. It needs to be delegated to others and then the leadership can step in as needed to help redefine the goals.
When companies bring me in, they are looking to gain an added advantage or edge for their team members. But I need to remind them a lot of times that I also need to work with the top 1-2% of their sales team members to help make the greatest difference or impact on their sales goals and targets. Many do not understand this concept as they think they need to improve others on the team to help fill in the gaps and voids in their sales funnels. What they forget or tend to miss is that the top tier individuals already know how to get this done and have proven it. Why not help them continue to grow and develop themselves personally and for the company.
By applying the 80/20 rule to employee training, organizations can create a more efficient and effective training program that yields maximum impact and maximizes employee performance. By continuing to develop your top tier individuals throughout the company will only make the leadership stronger, but will continue to grow revenue, customer satisfaction and retention and show the top tier individuals that you care about them. To many times top salespeople leave companies for other opportunities and I hear the managers say to me “I don’t know why they left, I let them do whatever they wanted and left them alone”. See the issue, the felt isolated and not part of the team because they meet their goals. Imagine Phil Jackson tell Michael Jordan he didn’t need to participate in shooting drills because he was already the best. How do you think that conversation would have gone?
Not sure where to start or how to engage your 80/20 training, reach out to us. We will help you define your 80/20 rule and help you grow your EBITA, revenue and more.
