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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

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.

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.