Jason M. Lemkin, a SaaS investor and former CEO, explains why top salespeople thrive when the economy tanks while mid-level and low performers struggle. During downturns, elite reps maintain or grow their numbers while others stall, flattening the typical performance curve across teams.
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What are you seeing in the top performers? Because what I've seen again and again and again, I'm seeing this all across my portfolio, right, is that when you get into tougher times, the impacts are not, are not the same across your sales team. In fact, your top performers, and even I saw this as a SaaS CEO in '08 and '09, which was 1,000 freaking times worse than today. Now we had churn and other issues. Mid-pack declined and the bottom reps just stopped selling. Right. And I'm seeing this across multiple portfolio, other companies. Where the top couple folks, like, they're doing the same, even better sometimes for, for other reasons, and then boom, the belt— but the, the distribution across the bell curve has radically changed from good times.