BRX Pro Tip: The Moneyball Approach
Stone Payton: And we’re back with Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor, Stone Payton here with you. Lee, I really enjoyed the movie Moneyball, and you’ve kind of made some sort of connection between that and how it might apply to business.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, absolutely. So Moneyball, for those who aren’t familiar with the book, then it was a movie about how you can apply sports analytics thinking to just kind of choosing different types of – it was about baseball, about different types of baseball players – by focusing in on something that maybe other teams weren’t focusing in on, in order to create a more valuable team as a whole, it may be less kind of superstars, but finding kind of those hidden gem people that had specific skills that would be more worthwhile when it came to it, in baseball’s case, generating more runs.
Lee Kantor: So how can you use sports analytics thinking to build a smarter sales process? Well, you know that baseball teams, they change dramatically by using data to find that hidden talent and create more winning plays.
Lee Kantor: So how do you do that with your sales team with less kind of gut feeling and guesswork and more smart moves? So number one, the first thing you have to do is identify the metric that really matters. What sales metric truly predicts success in your business? Is it called a meeting ratio? Is it how quickly you can get a proposal out or a recommendation out? You got to find whatever that key metric is and obsess over how to improve that.
Lee Kantor: And it may not be an obvious one just because everybody else is looking at one thing as the key metric. It may not be the key metric for you or your business. So you got to really spend a lot of time analyzing this and understanding what is the metric that really matters.
Lee Kantor: Number two is you’ve got to get rid of those kinds of gut-feeling decisions. That is a trap. That’s a bias. And it’s something that you really have to understand through math, through analytics, which tactic is driving sales, not what you think is driving sales, which is the metric that is actually the driver of sales.
Lee Kantor: What’s the metric you got to focus in on? Should it be the win rate? Should it be the deal size? Should it be the sales cycle? And whatever the pattern is or whatever the thing is, you’ve got to really understand what it is so that you can measure towards it and optimize for it.
Lee Kantor: So the Moneyball approach cuts through sales noise with data, and you got to use that same approach when it comes to your sales process. You want to be working smarter, not harder. And you don’t want to be doing something that used to work when there’s better ways today.
