Pareto Principle in Sales: 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers.

I used to think that more = better.

More accounts = more opportunities
Larger territory = more upside

This philosophy meant that I spent a little bit of time with a lot of accounts, and was thinly spread.

Less time invested also meant smaller deals.

The result: grinding, clawing, and hustling all year to barely reach quota.

What I’ve learned over the past 5 years is that less is more, especially when selling to Large Enterprises.

Fewer accounts = more focus

More focus enables you go high, wide, and deep into all areas of an account.

Large companies have multiple subsidiaries, sister companies, and departments to sell into.

You can make your entire number off of 1 or 2 accounts when you focus all your energy on helping them transform their business.

Large, transformational deals take time and require consensus from multiple stakeholders, and you can’t effectively quarterback these deals if you are thinly spread across too many accounts.

My territory went from 10 accounts to 5 accounts to 3 accounts to 2. And every time the territory got smaller, I performed better.

When you only have 2 accounts, it forces you to get creative, research, and develop a highly tailored Point of View (POV) as to how and where you can help your customers.

You become a trusted advisor and often know more about how their company operates than they do, because many large companies operate in siloes.

What was the result of this shift?

Fewer deals, but much larger in size.

My income went from 250k/year average my first four years at Salesforce to 750k/year average my last four years.

Less is more.