Fill your 5 buckets in the right order (2024)

Barlett’s first law is based on the principle that we all have five ‘buckets’ that we fill throughout our lives. The first bucket is filled with knowledge and what we know, the second with our skills and what we can do, the third with our network and who we know, the fourth with our resources or what we have access to, and the fifth with our reputation or the opinion others have of us.

These five buckets will ultimately dictate how successful you are, but Bartlett believes you must focus on filling them in order to achieve long-term success.

His theory works on the basis that by filling the first bucket, it will naturally overflow into the second and start filling that, and so on and so forth. So, by focusing on your knowledge, you will in time develop the skills that pair with that knowledge.

By developing those skills, you will grow your network and meet more like-minded people, which in turn will enable you to increase your resources. With the first four buckets full, you will already be filling the fifth, by having the knowledge, skills, network, and resources to automatically be filling the reputation bucket too. As a salesperson, reputation and trust are cornerstones of success, so it is clear to see how Bartlett’s first law can already help secure your base skillset.

By ignoring the first few buckets, whatever you aim to build in your personal or professional life will be built on weak foundations. Successful sales professionals will know this to be true when it comes to demoing a product.

By jumping in at the deep-end and launching straight into outreach with an enviable prospect, you will miss the vital first few buckets. While you might get an interested, ideal client, when they start to ask the difficult questions (because you’ve left some gaping holes in the foundation), it’s not so easy to deliver convincing or reassuring answers.

However, if you take the time to learn about the product, what it does, how it works, and can adequately demonstrate best practice for it, you will build a solid foundation on which you can take your client and deal forward. A solid framework is needed to build trust and relationships, both of which are central in sales. It’s therefore essential that salespeople recognise the importance of building their foundations the right way, and in the right order.

All the best,

Becky