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Business Lessons from the Movie "Moneyball"

Business Lessons from the Movie "Moneyball"

If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book Moneyball I highly recommend it. The movie is based on the true story of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. After several seasons of painful losses, the team's general manager, Billy Beane, adopted a radical, statistics-driven approach to building a competitive baseball team under an ownership that underinvested in the franchise. He faced resistance, lack of buy in and even public humiliation to change the way the organization operated. With his career on the line he stayed the course and ultimately his methods were proven successful.
Anyone who has ever led significant change within a business can certainly relate…

There are a few lessons that we can take away from this story:

Understand the need for change – When things are not working it is time to reevaluate. Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In Moneyball the change factor was technology. Using technology the A’s figured out a winning formula and put the necessary pieces in place to support this formula. They were able to acquire the necessary talent at a lower cost because other organizations were still using dated (manual) methods for evaluating talent.
Look for cost effective ways to compete - Like the Oakland A’s, small businesses should think differently realizing they may not have the budget to compete on the same level as larger well-funded competitors. We need to evaluate the way we market, sell and support our customers looking for ways to be unique and drive value. It may be necessary to take chances and come up with innovative and different strategies, because the traditional ways may not be working in today’s market.
Stay the course – Change is not easy. In the film Beane tried to convey the vision eliminating team members that refused to adapt. He spent weeks getting buy in from the players and let nothing stand in the way of his vision.
As business leaders, we all need to ask ourselves if we have adapted with the times. While implementing Microsoft CRM we work with the leadership of businesses to determine their goals and what it will take to accomplish them. One of the biggest obstacles is the lack of baseline data.
Without a CRM system it is very hard to determine things like:

  • Average length of the sales cycle
  • Close rates of the entire sales team
  • Lead conversion rates
  • Success of marketing investments
  • Actual profitability of customer accounts
  • Competitive win/loss rates

Using a properly implemented CRM solution exposes this information and allows you to change the way you operate to accomplish your goals. How can you change if you don’t know what’s not working? In Moneyball, Beane utilized technology to take a realistic look at the organization and it was clear they could not achieve success without significantly changing the way they operated. They embraced technology to expose their deficiencies and to determine what they needed to accomplish to succeed.
For more information on how a CRM solution can help you succeed please contact us.


theProfessor

theProfessor

Rob is the CTO of Beringer Technology Group, and focuses his efforts on software development, cloud engineering, team mentoring and strategic technical direction. Rob has worked with Beringer since 2005, and has influenced every department from Development, Security, Implementation, Support and Sales. Rob graduated with his MBA from Rowan University in 2012, earned his Bachelors of Computer Science in 1997, and is current with several Microsoft technical certifications. Rob is very active, and loves to mountain bike, weight train, cook and hike with his dog pack.

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