Jason M. Lemkin observes that in tougher economic times, sales performance becomes highly uneven: top performers often maintain or improve their results while mid and bottom performers decline or stop selling. He references similar patterns during the 2008–2009 downturn and notes this trend across multiple portfolio companies.
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 SAO in 08 and 09, which was a thousand frigging 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 tuple folks like they're doing the same, even better, sometimes for other reasons, and then boom, the belt. But the distribution across the bell curve has radically changed from good times.
