My 80/20 rule obsession

Do you ever find yourself repeating the same thing so many times, you get sick of hearing yourself? I have tried to remove some of the more annoying idioms from my talk track, so I’m actively trying to avoid advising against boiling the ocean, encouraging you to think out of the box, and suggesting you grab that tantalizing low-hanging fruit. And while teamwork may in fact make the dream work, it’s annoying as hell.  So I won’t say it.

But as anyone who has ever worked with me will tell you, I’m (annoyingly) obsessed with the 80/20 rule.  (The concept is derived from the Pareto principle, a worthy Google search if you’re looking for some light bedtime reading).  In short, the 80/20 rule observes that 20% of actions often result in 80% of outcomes.  The actual percentages aren’t meant to be accurate, it’s just implying that a focused minority of effort typically provides the most significant overall impact. 

B2B businesses often experience this, where 20% of their customers represent 80% of their revenue or profitability.  Do these businesses ignore the other 80% of customers?  No.  But they likely do invest more significantly in supporting these highest value customers. 

The 80/20 rule of marketing

As a GTM and product marketing leader, I repeat the 80/20 mantra so often simply because focus and prioritization are such critical skills in our roles. As I shared in my articles “The {Insert Everything} product marketing job description ” and “A B2B Product Marketer’s Worldview ,” the scope and expectations of a product marketing manager (PMM) are so often too expansive and impossible to achieve. PMM burnout is a real problem, and the best way to help mitigate this is to build the skills and confidence to help these folks prioritize and focus on the most relevant work that delivers the largest business impact. 

Here are a few examples of how I leverage the 80/20 rule to coach my teams and clients:

• Positioning and messaging.  (Don’t write boil the ocean, don’t write boil the ocean, don’t write boil the ocean…) PMMs often feel they need to boil the ocean (D’oh!) when developing their company and product messaging . They feel “our platform can solve so many problems and has so many features, why wouldn’t I discuss all of them?” Well, aside from the amount of time and effort required to capture compelling, differentiated, and value-driven messaging for everything - it’s also delivering massively diminishing returns. If you talk to customers and sales reps to understand why you’re winning deals, you’ll likely observe that the vast majority of your revenue is derived from a subset of use cases (typically for a mid-size B2B software vendor, I find that 3-5 use cases can account for 80% of revenue). The same goes for feature-level conversations. You likely have a massive list of cool features, but your most satisfied customers are likely using 20% of these features to manage 80% of their daily usage.  
• Sales enablement.  Sales is really hard. I’ve never carried a bag (sales slang for carrying a quota that reps need to hit every quarter/year), so I’ve never personally felt the pressure of that ticking clock where every moment you’re not selling means less chance of hitting your targets. Sales enablement teams , typically heavily supported by product marketing, are responsible for providing the necessary training to give reps the best chance of winning business. This includes training on corporate and product-level positioning, qualification criteria, objection handling, competitive intelligence, pricing and packaging, and more. The challenge here is how much time should a rep be in training vs. talking to prospects and trying to close deals. Similar to messaging, there is diminishing returns on enablement. I evangelize deploying both a push and pull strategy. The push is the required training for every rep that represents the 20% of content that will serve reps 80% of the time. The pull is optional training and content available to reps (often in an enablement or content portal) when they need it, but not required. 
• Competitive intelligence.  You’ve got to keep an eye on the competition to understand their strengths and weaknesses, how the market perceives them, and how to best win against them. But depending on your specific market, you may be competing either directly or from a mindshare perspective against dozens - if not hundreds - of vendors solving similar challenges. There is absolutely not enough time in the day or bandwidth to actively monitor and enable the field on every single competitor. But guess what?  20% of your competitors likely make up 80% of your competitive incidents.  Okay, I’ll argue against that - I bet for many of you, 5% of your competitors may make up 90% of your incidents! This is why I recommend creating competitive tiers. Your Tier 1 competitors are the ones that are most commonly contributing to lost deals or inhibiting your sales cycle. Those competitors deserve ongoing focus (whatever your resources and bandwidth allow). Tier 2 competitors are those that may have less current impact, but could potentially be a concern in the future.
• GTM execution channels. This is more of a head of marketing/CMO decision point vs PMM, but equally valid for this discussion.  Marketing leaders are feeling constant pressure to do more with less. More pipeline, more campaigns, more events, more content, less staff, less program dollars, less time to deliver.  Add the fact that every non-marketing leader feels they are a marketing expert and can’t understand why marketing just doesn’t “deliver” (without understanding what marketing actually does) just adds to the pressure. Every marketing leader should be as obsessed with the 80/20 rule as I am. Spreading limited headcount and program dollars thin across every possible marketing mix option doesn’t work. This is a lesson I learned from my brother Dave , a highly experienced B2B CMO. He identifies the few programs that drive the best results (e.g., Identify the 20% of marketing activities that drive 80% of the highest quality/converting pipeline). He then applies 80% of his resources to those programs, and focuses the remaining 20% of available resources on experimentation across other activities. And since your marketing mix needs to inevitably support increasing pipeline/revenue goals, the aim is for some experiments to graduate to “core” over time. Experimentation and exploring new channels/programs are key to setting up future success, whereas not diluting the best programs will increase chances of near term success.

Is it time to retire the 80/20 language, or time to double-down? Where else are you applying the 80/20 rule (or the Pareto principle if you prefer)?