Working Smarter Using the 80-20 Rule

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You may have noticed that your workforce has a minority of top performers. Perhaps your social media marketing efforts are producing uneven results, where most of your profitable leads come from a minority of social platforms. These observations point to how things are unevenly distributed. Very few things in the real world are perfectly even or proportional.

This unevenness is a fact of life that’s embodied in the 80-20 rule. It states that 20 percent of causes result in 80 percent of effects. The percentages don’t have to be 80-20 and they don’t have to add up to 100 percent. For example, 10 percent of your sales force could produce 100 percent of the sales if the other 90 percent never do their job. The main point from a business perspective is that you should commit most of your efforts and resources to the things, people, and activities that do the most good. Here are a few examples:

A Minority of Your Customers Create Most of Your Revenue

These are often your repeat customers. However, even within this group your revenue generation is uneven. There will be a few prolific purchasers of your goods or users of your services. While all of your repeat customers should get your attention, you may want to make greater efforts at retaining the customer satisfaction of your “superstar” customers. Your resources and time are better spent with these people than with prospects who turn a deaf ear to your marketing efforts.

A Minority of Your Social Media Platforms Bring in Most of Your Web Traffic

It’s unlikely that all of them produce identical results. If you notice a few top performers, focus most of your efforts on bringing more traffic from them. If your resources are tight, you might want to stop working with the worst performing platforms, at least until your resource shortage problem improves.

A Minority of Your Landing Pages Produce the Majority of Your Conversions

If your landing pages address the same demographic, then perhaps you should direct more of your traffic to the top performing pages instead of spending too much time and resources trying to “shore up” the poor performers. A few simple traffic redirects could result in a big increase of your revenue. While understanding why your poor performers aren’t converting is useful, the task should have a lower priority than getting the most from your top performers.

Because of the universality of the 80-20 rule, you should be alert to its appearance in other facets of your business. To best exploit this rule, you need extensive data from your business activities, and analytics that allow you to easily see these patterns.

Our automated marketing and CRM software allows you to set up, track, and monitor social media campaigns, landing pages, and email marketing campaigns. Your customer activity is easily tracked so that you can identify your superstar customers. For more information about this, contact us today.

Source: B2C