80/20 Rule for Marketing & Sales #shorts

29 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this short video, Elliott Botterill outlines a simple 80/20 framework for marketing and sales teams. He advises that roughly 80% of a team’s time should be devoted to repeatable, proven activities that reliably generate results, while the remaining 20% should be reserved for testing new ideas and experimenting. Botterill notes that many businesses mistakenly reverse this balance—spending the majority of their time on unproven initiatives—leading to stagnation because new efforts typically have a low success probability. The message emphasizes the importance of focusing on what works while still allocating a modest portion of resources for innovation.

Chapters

The way we like to look at our business and our marketing and sales in particular is that 80% of our team's time should be spent on the stuff that we know works, doing more of the proven boring stuff that already exists. 20% of your time then, well, that can be allocated to the new stuff, that can be allocated to the tests, that can be allocated to your new ideas to kind of scratch that realm and make sure that we are innovating, which is of course a useful thing in a business. But most businesses, they flip this and they end up spending 20% of their time on stuff that works and 80% of the time on new stuff. And that is why business stagnates, because all the new stuff generally has a low probability of actually working out.