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(I'm the author.) I don't disagree that the amount you learn and how well you understand it might accelerate as you advance along the learning curve. My post w

(I'm the author.) I don't disagree that the amount you learn and how well you understand it might accelerate as you advance along the learning curve. My post was more about the "practical" side of knowledge: often knowing 1% or 5% of what an expert knows gets you 30% or 50% or 80% of the practical benefit. The specific numbers don't matter -- only the order of magnitude difference between time invested and value extracted. As an extreme hypothetical, consider three sales people, one with 500 hours of experience, one with 5k hours, and one with 50k hours. Each order of magnitude in experience might represent an order of magnitude more knowledge/learnings. Or maybe even more! But I doubt that the person with 50k hours of experience closes 10x more sales than the "5000 hour" salesperson, and 100x more than the "500 hour" sales person. It's probably more like 2x and 1.1x, respectively. (Or maybe 5x and 3x... but nowhere near 100x/10x.) You're right about my 30% estimate though -- it's just an estimate, and quite possibly a sign of naivete/overconfidence. But I do think knowing some of the basics -- even if the knowledge is just through books and shadowing a few sales calls -- would put me ahead of the average person who never learned anything about sales.

angersock 11y ago
I'll call bullshit on that, with all respect. Your 500 hour salesperson has been on the job a bit over 12 work weeks. Your 50000 hour salesperson has been on the job 24 years. I'll wager that the latter salesperson not only closes more deals but more lucrative ones as well. In your article, you compare the rank novice with somebody with a 100 hours of experience--this is fine. Extending that logic to comparisons between folks already in the field I don't think works.
- lpolovets 11y ago
  The person with 20 years of work experience obviously closes more deals than someone with 3 months of experience. But I think my original point stands. To put it simply/mathematically: if you are able to close 10% of your sales calls, then no matter how much you learn, you will never be able to improve than stat by more than 10X in practice. There is no way to close more than 100% of your calls. So there are strong diminishing returns in that respect.
  - laxatives 11y ago
    I guess diminishing returns depends on how you measure utility or whatever heuristic you want to optimize. If you close 10% calls, but the average salesperson closes 50%, you haven't accomplished much. If the experienced salesperson only closes 60%, but also closes high value deals that no else would have been able to, their value is much higher than 6x your value. There probably isn't a linear relationship between skill and utility. Utility depends on how you compare with others, which probably has a bell shaped curve among enthusiasts/professionals. I'd wager in most cases, utility roughly tracks variance from average. One example is loads of people want to work in entertainment, but the most successful makes loads more money, even if they are only slightly better. Kind of a tangent, but this is why its always better to work with more reliable people. A person who does good work 50% of the time isn't half as good as someone who does good work always. They are arguably worse than someone who does good work 25% of the time, because now you can't make any assumptions. You have to double check everything they do and you can't trust anything the say. At least with the first quartile peer, you know what you are getting. My upshot is that utility doesn't scale relative to how good you are compared with the best, its how you stand compared to your competitors, most of which are probably about average.
- ethikal 11y ago
  Bullshit on what? Your argument makes no sense. He's not arguing that a 50K hour salesperson doesn't close more lucrative and more numerous amounts of deals than the 500 hour salesperson. The point is that you can invest a small(ish) amount of time to learn the basics of skills which will help you avoid critical pitfalls when starting a company - an extremely worthy investment when you consider the diminishing returns of mastery and the fact that you can't be a master of everything.
- Tenhundfeld 11y ago
  I think you can both be right, somewhat. The author supposed the person with 50k hours will be better than the person with 500 hours, but maybe just 5x better not 100x better. And that could be accurate. Put each of them in 1000 identical situations, and the more experienced one will close more deals but not 100x deals, probably. However, that's not the real world. In the real world, the salesperson with 24 years of experience has contacts and relationships that, to your point, will help them land more lucrative deals. So, yeah, they might not close 100x the number of deals, but they could easily close deals worth 100x to their business. Or to frame it in software development, if you give the same exact task to a developer with 12 weeks of experience and one with 24 years of experience, the more experienced one probably won't finish it 100x faster. However, if you're giving them the same tasks, that's a gross misuse of skills. The more experienced one might architect the system so that task naturally falls out of the design or knows of an open source tool that can handle it with no custom development or maybe they understand the business well enough to propose a simple tweak to business processes to obviate the need to do the task at all – that is, they might bring 100x value overall. My point is just that, sure, there are diminishing returns on experience solving the exact same problem, but a person with 500 hours of experience and on with 50k hours of experience shouldn't be working on the exact same problems. It's kind of like that old question when looking at a résumé: Do they have 10 years of experience or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times?
  - angersock 11y ago
    I think there certainly are cases where the more experienced one will finish 100x faster! In actual numbers, that means that anything that takes the senior dev, say, 3 hours, must not take the junior developer more than 7.5 weeks. Junior devs are really, really bad at certain categories of task, and can totally blow that budget of two months. Sure, the 100x speed difference might not exist when writing a binary search for a sorted array. However, being able to throw up a small shell pipeline or something instead of trying to write a bespoke program is where the difference starts to come out.

angersock 11y ago

I'll call bullshit on that, with all respect. Your 500 hour salesperson has been on the job a bit over 12 work weeks. Your 50000 hour salesperson has been on the job 24 years. I'll wager that the latter salesperson not only closes more deals but more lucrative ones as well. In your article, you compare the rank novice with somebody with a 100 hours of experience--this is fine. Extending that logic to comparisons between folks already in the field I don't think works.

lpolovets 11y ago
The person with 20 years of work experience obviously closes more deals than someone with 3 months of experience. But I think my original point stands. To put it simply/mathematically: if you are able to close 10% of your sales calls, then no matter how much you learn, you will never be able to improve than stat by more than 10X in practice. There is no way to close more than 100% of your calls. So there are strong diminishing returns in that respect.
- laxatives 11y ago
  I guess diminishing returns depends on how you measure utility or whatever heuristic you want to optimize. If you close 10% calls, but the average salesperson closes 50%, you haven't accomplished much. If the experienced salesperson only closes 60%, but also closes high value deals that no else would have been able to, their value is much higher than 6x your value. There probably isn't a linear relationship between skill and utility. Utility depends on how you compare with others, which probably has a bell shaped curve among enthusiasts/professionals. I'd wager in most cases, utility roughly tracks variance from average. One example is loads of people want to work in entertainment, but the most successful makes loads more money, even if they are only slightly better. Kind of a tangent, but this is why its always better to work with more reliable people. A person who does good work 50% of the time isn't half as good as someone who does good work always. They are arguably worse than someone who does good work 25% of the time, because now you can't make any assumptions. You have to double check everything they do and you can't trust anything the say. At least with the first quartile peer, you know what you are getting. My upshot is that utility doesn't scale relative to how good you are compared with the best, its how you stand compared to your competitors, most of which are probably about average.
ethikal 11y ago
Bullshit on what? Your argument makes no sense. He's not arguing that a 50K hour salesperson doesn't close more lucrative and more numerous amounts of deals than the 500 hour salesperson. The point is that you can invest a small(ish) amount of time to learn the basics of skills which will help you avoid critical pitfalls when starting a company - an extremely worthy investment when you consider the diminishing returns of mastery and the fact that you can't be a master of everything.
Tenhundfeld 11y ago
I think you can both be right, somewhat. The author supposed the person with 50k hours will be better than the person with 500 hours, but maybe just 5x better not 100x better. And that could be accurate. Put each of them in 1000 identical situations, and the more experienced one will close more deals but not 100x deals, probably. However, that's not the real world. In the real world, the salesperson with 24 years of experience has contacts and relationships that, to your point, will help them land more lucrative deals. So, yeah, they might not close 100x the number of deals, but they could easily close deals worth 100x to their business. Or to frame it in software development, if you give the same exact task to a developer with 12 weeks of experience and one with 24 years of experience, the more experienced one probably won't finish it 100x faster. However, if you're giving them the same tasks, that's a gross misuse of skills. The more experienced one might architect the system so that task naturally falls out of the design or knows of an open source tool that can handle it with no custom development or maybe they understand the business well enough to propose a simple tweak to business processes to obviate the need to do the task at all – that is, they might bring 100x value overall. My point is just that, sure, there are diminishing returns on experience solving the exact same problem, but a person with 500 hours of experience and on with 50k hours of experience shouldn't be working on the exact same problems. It's kind of like that old question when looking at a résumé: Do they have 10 years of experience or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times?
- angersock 11y ago
  I think there certainly are cases where the more experienced one will finish 100x faster! In actual numbers, that means that anything that takes the senior dev, say, 3 hours, must not take the junior developer more than 7.5 weeks. Junior devs are really, really bad at certain categories of task, and can totally blow that budget of two months. Sure, the 100x speed difference might not exist when writing a binary search for a sorted array. However, being able to throw up a small shell pipeline or something instead of trying to write a bespoke program is where the difference starts to come out.