We work with company executives who believe it's insane to have 20 percent of their salespeople closing 80 percent of their sales, and who want to eliminate this madness forever.

If you are such an executive, spend the next 60 seconds reading the following summary on our thinking, then call us if you want to hear more.

Why 80-20 Exists, And How To Kill It

Two Sales Team Models Exist

• Me-Based Model: Salespeople function independently, win or fail alone, and get rewarded based on individual accomplishments.
  
• We-Based Model: Salespeople function as a unit, win or fail as a unit, and get rewarded as a unit -- just like everyone else at the company.
  

You Get What You Reward

• Me-Based Model: When you build a commission-based sales team, you reward an every-man-for-himself model of selling that promotes secrecy, deceit, me-centric thinking and salesdrip behavior, and attracts two types of salespeople: 1) leaders who thrive on competition, who love money and whose egos cannot tolerate being anything but the best; 2) followers who enjoy blending in, who are happy with average pay and who prefer to leave their job at the office.
   
  When you reward individualistic behavior, you will always end up with this mix, because for the first group to be truly happy the second group must exist.
• We-Based Model: When you build a salary-based sales team (rewarding your salespeople the same way you reward all other employees at your company), you get an all-in-it-together model of selling that promotes openness, honesty, group-centric thinking and professionalism, and attracts collaborative people (leaders and followers) who thrive on teamwork and camaraderie. This creates a team result and gives executives total control over that result, because to change the results, you simply change the system the team uses, not the team itself.
  

Breaking 80-20

Your company's employees, you included, are rewarded as a group, win as a group and lose as a group, and we think it's sheer lunacy to build a sales team that is rewarded differently.

However, we don't call it "Honest Selling" for nothing, so we'll end with a bit of brutal reality. While the end-game -- having a sales team that produces predictable, controllable, repeatable success -- is wonderful, the journey from a Me-Based team to a We-Based team is not for the faint of heart. It takes dedicated effort and comes with tons of transitional pain.

Of course, true innovation always does.