The 80/20 Principle

Some of you may have heard of the 80/20 principle (also known as the Pareto principle) which states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In terms of our jobs as efficiency sales professionals, this means that 80% of our sales might come from 20% of our customers. Of course, this figure varies from person to person; however, the concept that a large majority of our success comes from a small minority of our efforts is a powerful one.
What if we were to focus our time and effort on the 20% that has the greatest impact on the result we hope to accomplish (whether it is the best clients with the highest return, the marketing campaign that has shown the most customer engagement, or the product that people are most interested in purchasing)? Rather than spreading our time evenly across all of our duties, we should focus a disproportionate amount of attention on the ones that have the greatest amount of impact.
If you’re interested in the 80/20 principle and want a practical guide to help you implement it into your business plan, I recommend picking up a copy of The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less, by Richard Koch.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“How anyone can be more effective with less effort by learning how to identify and leverage the 80/20 principle--the well-known, unpublicized secret that 80 percent of all our results in business and in life stem from a mere 20 percent of our efforts.

“The 80/20 principle is one of the great secrets of highly effective people and organizations.

“Did you know, for example, that 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of revenues? That 20 percent of our time accounts for 80 percent of the work we accomplish? The 80/20 Principle shows how we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts. Although the 80/20 principle has long influenced today's business world, author Richard Koch reveals how the principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve our careers and our companies.

“The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 principle is that little of what we spend our time on actually counts. But by concentrating on those things that do, we can unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, and transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives.”
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