Bill Canady explains how the 80/20 principle identifies your highest-impact growth opportunities, not by cutting costs but by focusing resources on your most valuable customers and products. He covers team selling, cross-selling, and CRM systems to surface new opportunities, plus the operational readiness needed to scale.
When you think about 80/20, it's very easy to think, wow, it's a resource reduction process, right? My real goal is to cut out— that is absolutely as far from the truth as it can be, right? It's really about taking a company that is unfocused, scattered across everything, and getting it focused on a critical few things. Once you've identified where those are, it's not just your big accounts and your great products, it's ones that also have the ability to grow, and there's more opportunity there for it. Once you've identified that, You've now entered into the growth phase, right? So you got your data, you got it segmented so you know where it's supposed to go, you simplified it so it's just a critical few, you've shifted your resource, you've got them aligned around where customers value and the products that we can actually go do it. Now you got to go grow this thing. And this is where you start looking at things. And it depends on your business, how do you go to market, how you go to market as a manufacturer versus distributor. You know, ultimately it's about taking care of customers, but you need to understand where you are in that value chain, what your role is, and what the value that you bring. Once you understand that, that's where you make sure particularly your customer-facing resources are aligned around not only your, your best customers, but your best opportunities and where you can go and run with that. Typical growth actions that you'll see will be things like team selling, where you've got different segments and they have to sell across it. We call it cross-selling, team selling, Pick whatever euphemism you like, but it's about getting the organization together and using that to go faster in it, right? So if you sell pumps and you sell compressors, people buying compressors also buy pumps and vice versa. How do you get that knowledge through there? And you're looking at things like CRMs or, you know, databases and things like that where customers are in there, what they're buying is in there, but your salesman can see it. Other things that you can look at are around, uh, if you're a commodity type sell, The person's going in there and we call it carry the big bag. So not only are they selling, you know, hangers and wires and fasteners, but they also have finishing and filtration and other things in it, gaskets or whatever the case may be. You know, a lot of times what you find there is that's a customer that it's the access to the customer that gets it there and they're buying in volume of these things. So there's many different ways to go about it, but you need to look at that, understand what your value prop is, and then put around commercial programs that's going to get you there. Don't forget while you're doing this though, make sure your operations are set up well because you got You gotta have the inventory in, you gotta meet the delivery times, you gotta meet your pricing and all the things. So none of that changes, but you should have a very focused company around a few items that you know you can go out and really set it on fire with. At the end of the day, this is what's actually where your company's gonna change. This is where you're gonna make all the money, right? So you should see a lot of excitement in the organization at this point. You should be putting out a lot of things around, we've got promotions, we got products, new product development, you name it, this is where it's happening at. This is what everything— you are now laser-focused on what customers value, and you're going to go deliver it to them.
