You Haven't Hit Your Peak Yet!

19Sales and Marketing

Law of large numbers pays large dividends

If you can’t be number one, the best position you can shoot for is number two.

It doesn’t matter if it’s politics or business, number two is the strongest position to be in, because when number one has trouble or messes up in some way, number two is there to take over.

Many people have the attitude that if they can’t be number one, who cares if you’re number two or number 10. You still aren’t the winner.

Vince Lombardi once said, “There is no room for second place. There’s only one place, and that’s first place.”

That may be true for athletics, but it’s certainly not true for business. You have to think long term and what can happen in the future. In sales, if you don’t get the order, shoot for runner-up.

Consider Jacob Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers, which states that if an experiment is repeated a certain number of times, the relative frequency of an occurrence tends to be a fixed number. An entire industry, insurance, is built on the principle of the Law of Large Numbers. There are 329 million living Americans. The insurance people can tell you within one-fourth of 1 percent just how many of us are going to die within the next 12 months—and how—and where—and in what age bracket, sex, color, and creed. That’s pretty amazing. The only thing they can’t tell us is which ones!

Being an envelope guy, one of my favorite examples of the Law of Large Numbers is direct mail. How many pieces of advertising do you receive ...