My View of Sales

It was the summer of ’78, going into my sophomore year of high school.?My mother and father separated.?My mother took my sister, while I stayed with my dad.?It was a tough time, but it was also one of the more memorable times.?

We were living in a small duplex in Wilmington Delaware.?That summer, the Philadelphia Phillies had seven twilight doubleheaders.?So starting at 7:00 pm, they played two games.?My dad decided we would get tickets to all seven doubleheaders.?Since these were crazy late games, we were able to get good seats, close to the field.?It was then that he taught me how to score baseball games, something that I have done ever since.

Scoring the Game

I started with the standard way of scoring games, but the more I did it, I started to use my own way of scoring.?I added more information to the scoring sheet.?Instead of just writing down that a batter hit a single, I also wrote down whether it was hit to left, center, or right.

I got to know the players as well.?I understood the lineups better.?I started to see what the opposing team saw.?The game slowed down and I was able to predict.?I picked up on more data to capture as my experience grew.?I have done it ever since.

I was not the Only One

Fast-forward to the 2000 baseball season where the Oakland A’s made the playoffs for the first time in a very long time and did so for the next three seasons in a row.?This was the topic of Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball, in which he chronicled Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane’s use of analytics to assemble winning teams for very little salary money.?That stuck with me for a very long time.

Helping Sell

At the same time, I was doing a lot of sales “help.”?It wasn’t called sales enablement at the time and no one wanted to call it sales training since sales training had a bad image.?

During that time, I wondered if the same types of technique that Bill James, the thought-leader of Moneyball, used on baseball, would work with sales.?That was as far as I took it.

In 2008, now doing fully-fledged sale enablement, I looked at new areas to explore to push sales enablement to the next level.?This took me to study psychology, become a Master Practitioner in NLP, and once again, think about Moneyball.?

Not Good Enough

I felt that I needed more education, so I went back to school and received my Masters's In Organizational Leadership in 2009.?That gave me a small taste of what could be done, but it was not enough.?I decided to pursue my Ph.D. in 2009, but some family issues pushed this out to 2010.?I was getting close.

All this time, I was still working as a sales enablement professional, doing the day-to-day work, but always keeping an eye open for the next thing.?I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in 2010.

Fuel on the Fire

It was the fall of 2011 when the movie, Moneyball was released with Brad Pitt playing the lead role of Billy Beane.?I remember watching it, which only fueled my desire all over again to chase this endeavor.

I started to put things together and it looked great on paper, but I had nowhere to actually put it into practice until early 2013.

My Big Break

I had the good fortune that we were hiring over 1000 sales reps into the company and they all needed to be trained, and I got the nod to execute the plan.?I was going to be able to put Moneyball concepts to work.

One big difference between baseball and sales is that baseball skills are hard skills, things you do with things, while sales is a set of soft skills, things you do with people.?Thus, the techniques had to be different, but the analytics could remain the same.?Off we went.

Out of the 1000 or so reps hired, I was able to measure over a period of 18 months the sales trajectory of 746 reps, looking for the one (or few) numbers that would tell me who would rise to be a star.

Our results, $50MM more revenue than forecast, mostly margin.?This more than paid for the program.?Four out of the top six reps in their first quarter came through this program.?After 9 years, most are still in sales and in advanced positions such as Senior Directors, VPs, and even some CXOs.

The Parallels

In the movie Moneyball, the one number for hitters was On Base Percentage (OBP).?Jonah Hill’s character suggested that instead of paying for players, clubs needed to pay for runs and the best indicator of obtaining runs is whether or not a hitter could get on base.?Either through a hit (the most traditional way), through a walk, or hit by a pitch - it did not matter.?This was a whole new way of looking at baseball since the inception of the game.

Since this was a hard skill, the approach?was transferable from club to club.?It was after the season of 2002 that the Boston Red Sox, a club that had not won a world series since 1918, tried to hire Beane for $12.5 Million a year to obtain this approach.?He declined, but the Red Sox took on the approach anyway, hired Bill James, and won World Series in 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018, a rather unprecedented run of wins all due to this analytical approach.

Did It Work?

What about my run??Well, there are some similarities, some differences, and some opportunities.?I will provide one of each for brevity's sake.?First the similarities. We were able to find one specific number that forecasted rep success.?It was whether or not a rep could tell the company story.?The company story was about the inception of the company, the company philosophy, why the products are what they are and how they connect together and help the customer.?There was also a degree of expression in telling the story.?Did they really believe in the story that they were telling??The more they believed, the better the rep performed. Could we be changing the way we look at reps since the inception of the role?

The big difference is that this same number does not work in all organizations.?Each company has its own number(s).?It exists, you just need to find it.?We continued to apply this approach to other companies, each time finding their number leading to finding their success.

The opportunity.?Baseball is a team sport, nine players on the field and batting work towards one number, more runs than the other team.?In the movie, Brad Pitt’s character needs to replace three very talented players that they are losing because they are going to other teams that pay more (sound familiar?).?Taking the one number, OBP, they figure out what these three players brought to the table.?

The players they were losing and their OBPs were, Jason Giambi’s?with a .477 OBP, Johnny Damon, .324, and Rainer Gustavo “Ray” Olmedo, .291.?Add them all up, you get 1.092, then divide the number by three and you get .364.?The goal was to look for players that had a .364 OBP, or better, regardless of what other skills they may or may not have.

Here is the Problem

Sales is not a team sport.?As much as people continue to say it is, it’s not.?It never has been.?I have worked for companies that have leaderboards showing the world which salesperson is closing the most revenue, creating internal competition.?Large account teams have a sales team, but only the assigned sales rep gets the money and the accolades.??There are no interdependencies... but there could be.

What if there is a sales team that used its strengths, together??What if we knew the one or two numbers that made the difference??We could recruit better, we could perform better, as a team, and, ultimately, generate more revenue, which is, after all, the goal of sales.

In 2000 both the Yankees and the A’s won the same amount of games, but the Yankees paid $1.4MM per win, The Oakland A’s, $260k. Though part of the goal in baseball is to win within budget, the story here is that Beane found players that were undervalued by baseball because they did not look like the typical baseball player.

What do a winemaker, Office Depot stock person, and a car parts reseller have in common? They are all sales executives in B2B companies.?Oh, and they all played moneyball in sales with me.

Who would have thought that the summer of ’78 would bring me to such a time as this?

Your Opportunity

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