(FORTUNE Magazine) – Day after day I've overheard the budget makers commiserating in the elevator: "How're you doing?" "Getting there, but it's a bitch. How about you?" Every year it's the same. They come back from summer vacation bronzed and refreshed, forgetting what waits for them. They'd sent the first draft of the budget upstairs before they left. While they were at the beach, it came back, bread cast upon the waters, with the usual instructions: Your costs are too high, your revenues too low, and the deadline for version two is a week earlier than last year. From Labor Day to Halloween, half the business world is sleep deprived.

But it's done. You feel as you did in those glorious weeks after your first child started sleeping through the night. Your face looks a little less like grooved pavement. You can rest until you get the first variance analysis, and that's in February.

Don't rest: Now's your chance. The three months after you've completed the budget offer a once-a-year opportunity to buy insurance for next year. If you do it right, you can make sales jump enough to make the year a slam-dunk. Here's how.

Our tale begins in November 1993, in the picturesque Thames Valley village of Marlow, headquarters of Rank Xerox, the 80%-owned subsidiary of Xerox which that year sold $4.5 billion worth of copiers, document processors, and services, mostly in Europe. Actually, the story's origins trace to Xerox's almost religious belief in the processes of benchmarking and sharing best practices. Benchmarking is a matter of identifying who's best at something (in your company, in your industry, in the world), not by guesswork or reputation but by the numbers: The Widget division cuts an invoice for 55 cents; Gadgets, for 45 cents; and Doodads, for 35 cents; so Doodads is the benchmark. Best-practice sharing means documenting exactly how Doodads does dunning, then encouraging plagiarism.

Like a lot of companies, Xerox usually applied benchmarking to the cost side of the ledger. In late 1993, folks in Marlow got the idea of doing it on the revenue side. The project was given to a team, which was called Team C--a couple of dozen people from the sales, service, and administrative staffs, of whom a third worked for Marlow and two-thirds for operating divisions across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. (There'd been Teams A and B earlier: Team A managed the decentralization of Rank Xerox early in the decade, and B spent a year probing the question "Now that we've decentralized, what's left for Marlow?" Team C was part of the answer: One job for headquarters is to help divisions learn from one another.)

Team C's initiator was Lyndon Haddon, now 55, a Rank Xerox director. Haddon was running operations in Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Mideast. He earned gobs of frequent-flier miles and at least one infrequently bestowed honor: Last summer he returned from Africa with a medallion, robe, and hats from his installation as a chief of the Ifewara tribe in Nigeria. (I guess their copier never jams.)

Team C set up a remarkably simple and successful program. Call it plug-and-play benchmarking. Team members gathered all kinds of sales data, making country-by-country comparisons. It took just a couple of weeks to find eight cases in which one country dramatically outperformed the others. Somehow France sold five times more color copiers than its sister divisions. Switzerland's sales of Xerox's top-of-the-line DocuPrint machines--digital copiers that can receive documents electronically and store them so you can make copies at any time--were ten times greater than those of any other country. Little Dubai, in the Persian Gulf, was the only country making telephone sales. One country suffered a 15% attrition rate when service contracts came up for renewal, but Austria lost only 4%.

Step two was to send team members to the benchmark country. Their instructions: Simply find out how it was done; don't try to figure out why it worked. The team then put together a book for each country's sales and service managers that showed what each benchmark was, how their territory compared with it, and how the top performer's systems worked.

Implementation, of course, is where good ideas run aground, usually on one of three rocks: Data denial (it just ain't so), exceptionalism (our market's different), or you-can't-make- him-drinkism (your suggestions deserve careful study). When a company is decentralized, those rocks are close to the surface. The paradox of devolution is that the very reason you do it--to let people experiment with ideas that fit the special needs of their markets--undercuts the ability to transfer those ideas from one part of the company to another.

Team C found a way around the rocks. Denial wouldn't work because the documentation was about results: The Swiss were indisputably selling more DocuPrint machines. It skirted the other two by giving country managers face-savers, choices, and carrots. The team selected cases so that no country was the benchmark in more than one, so most offices got to teach as well as learn. Country managers were told to pick three or four best practices to implement, so they got to decide what would work best. And they got ambitious goals--get at least 70% of the way to the benchmark standard the first year--that couldn't be attained if a group dithered.

One surprising mandate did come from on high, however: Don't think, just do. Says Haddon: "They absolutely could not change anything in year one. Don't do the normal and say 'I can do better than that.' No one could be certain why something worked; so if you made a change, you might alter the very thing that was key. Save that for year two." Says Team C member John Moore, who works in the U.K.'s office documents products division: "The whole point was that these were finite projects, not an open- ended process." In most cases, country managers visited the benchmark country and copied and installed its method in a matter of weeks.

The results were breathtaking. For example, by copying France's practices in selling color copiers--chiefly by improving sales training and making sure that color copiers were pushed through dealer channels as well as direct sales--Switzerland increased its unit sales by 328%, Holland by 300%, Norway by 152%, and so on.

Overall, Rank Xerox's internal audit group found that in the first year, 1994, an extra $65 million in sales--that is, above-budget revenue beyond what could be explained by new products, the economy, or any other factor--could be credited to team C initiatives. That was 1.4% of sales. By the end of the second year, the combined incremental sales growth from two years' worth of plug-and-play benchmarking was $200 million, 3.64% of Rank Xerox's 1995 revenues of $5.5 billion. (Go ahead: Open up the spreadsheet with your 1997 budget figures. Stick those sales increases on top of what you budgeted and hit Enter. Nice, huh?)

There are a couple of obvious lessons from Team C's success, and a less obvious sequel. First, there's more knowledge lying around your shop than you think, and if you can put it to good use, it represents a lot of easy money. As consultant Sid Caesar said, "The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius." So be a genius. Copy team C's approach.

Second, exceptionalism is the exception. Most production and systems people know this now, but, Haddon says, "it was a cultural shock for marketing people." Tell them France is better, and they say, "Well, the French are different." With this sentiment the French, of course, agree.

The sequel's interesting. Team C has evolved. The plug-and-play program still goes on in the field, but team C has put its energy into an open-ended, companywide sales-force-productivity program. All the benchmarking, plus a market survey, turned up numbers about how often a sales rep was on hand or on the phone at the time when someone made a decision to buy copying equipment. The answer: Two times out of three, Rank Xerox missed a chance to make a pitch. Rivals like Ricoh and Canon did no better.

Improving coverage is a monster. You can't flood the world with reps, because they're expensive. Under Jim Havard, Team C's new leader in the U.K., the group is pushing a complex package: 200 pages of best practices showing how to improve market databases and how to mix feet-on-the-street selling with direct mail and telemarketing to use sales time better. It's taken most of a year to see results. Europe's economy is so flat you'd think Magellan fell off the edge of the earth, but Rank Xerox U.K. reps are now on the scene for 40% of buying decisions and Havard expects to see market share gains at year-end.

It's too early to tell how successful this second wave is, but one lesson is clear: Without the experience of the plug-and-play stuff, employees riding wave two would never get past the rocks that threaten to sink any attempt to ship knowledge from one part of a company to another.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Ed Brown