80/20 Sales and Marketing

Perry Marshall

I’ve worked with Perry Marshall for a number of years.  We meet together several times a year – I use him as a sounding board for my biggest ideas and toughest problems. I’ve watched the 80/20 principles he covers in his book percolate in his mind and discussions over the years as he was pulling it all together.  He describes how it all came together, some of the surprises and epiphanies he had as he tested and retested the principles of 80/20.  There have been a number of books about 80/20 – the most notable being Richard Koch who wrote the forward to Perry’s book.

One of the most interesting and valuable additions to the 80/20 theory Perry provides is the “skew curve” calculator that lets you analyze visually the relationship between values (costs, customers.. anything) according to the 80/20 distribution.

Several months before the book was completed, Perry and I spent an hour running numbers through the calculator to predict the outcome and effect changing the pricing structure for a client who sells a $60,000 product.  The beauty of 80/20 is that you can actually predict distributions.

Using the calculator we discovered that if I changed the pricing structure from a single level to a three tier level I could almost immediately double the clients income while keeping the same number of customers – and with only a small amount of work to make it happen.

That’s the kind of leverage 80/20 provides.  Perry’s book isn’t the dry, jargon filled text  you might expect from a book dealing in mathematics and probability.  Perry’s writing style is easy to read and understand. His ideas are easy to implement.  This is one of those books I’ve recommended to all of my clients and their staff.