MONEYBALL, and The Rise of the Data Driven Channel!
MONEYBALL changed baseball and now it's changing channel management.
Moneyball, the movie, was released in 2011, starring Brad Pitt as baseball manager Billy Beane. It’s based on a true and very interesting story:
The year is 2001 and Billie Beane, the Oakland Athletics GM, is upset by his team’s loss to the New York Yankees in the postseason. He wonders how he can ever assemble a team to compete with the likes of the Yankees, which has a payroll many times greater than Oakland? He must find a way to overcome Oakland’s limited payroll.
Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane has an epiphany: he realizes that he must outsmart the richer clubs rather than out spend them. To do this, he’s going to have to throw conventional baseball wisdom out the window.
During a visit to the Cleveland Indians, Beane meets Peter Brand, a young Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about how to assess players' value. Beane tests Brand's theory by asking whether he would have drafted him out of high school. Beane was a major-league player and a highly touted prospect out of high school. Though scouts considered Beane a phenomenal prospect, his career in the Major Leagues was disappointing. Brand admits that he would not have drafted him until the ninth round. Impressed, Beane hires the inexperienced Brand to be the Athletics assistant general manager.
Against significant odds, and the loss of several key players to free agency, Oakland returned to the playoffs the following year. Boston, impressed by Beane’s successful strategy, adopted his system of analytics and went on to win a World Series.
The Athletics turned to analytics and changed baseball forever. No longer would players be measured by how they “looked” running bases or swinging the bat. They would be measured by statistical data, e.g. on-base percentage, hitting success against right handed vs. left handed pitchers, and many others.
ChannelSAGE Brings Moneyball to Channel Management
Now, ChannelSAGE is creating the data driven channel. Why? Because channel managers are dreadfully lacking real-time analytical data that will enable them to win at channel management. Channel Managers are making too many decisions based upon what they “think” is happening in their channel vs. what is really happening. Channel Managers are too often surprised by results that they should have seen coming—results that they could have altered had they known what was actually happening sooner and in real time.
Real-time Channel Data--When You Need it...Where You Need it.
In most cases, it’s not that the data isn’t ‘out there’. It’s that the effort required to compile and gather that data is prohibitive. The data is in too many disparate systems, from too many vendors, and deployed using too many variant methodologies. And none of these readily talk to one another. Now complicate that with no central channel management hub to organize and gather that data and you’ve got a complete system failure.
In a recent survey designed by March Insight, and sponsored by Relayware, it was shown that “For half of channel managers, determining revenue alone for just their largest partner from the past six months would require 20 minutes or more; for one in three channel managers (35%), it would take 30 minutes or longer. Repeat that process for every metric, for every partner, and for every week, the time spent adds up quickly.”1
Put the Pulse of your Channel in the Palm of your Hand!
Our goal at ChannelSAGE is to “put the pulse of your channel in the palm of your hand”. Through PRM technology, acting as the hub of your channel management activities, you will be able to use your mobile device to track the following:
The revenue from each of your channel partners
The number of leads created by your channel partners
Won/loss metrics
The ‘readiness’ of each partner to support your products and services through training and certification
The dollar volume of your pipeline, and the potential value in each stage of the funnel
The engagement level of each partner with your brand
And much more.
The Value of Powerful, Integrated BI Software
Through the integration of the Sisense business intelligence engine with a PRM system acting as the hub of your channel management strategy, we can connect you to your data and create powerful dashboards that play in real-time on all your devices, including mobile.
If you’re a Channel Manager we’d like to talk with you. We have several programs available to help you see the incredible value of real time data in the palm of your hand.
You will never again be in the dark. You will never again be surprised by results. And, hopefully, you’ll never utter again the dreaded phrase “Wow! I didn’t see that coming!”
MONEYBALL and the Rise of the Data Driven Channel, is available now from ChannelSAGE! Contact me, Paul Tobin, to discuss the many programs we have available for channels of all sizes.
1 Excerpted from “The Data Driven Channel”. This survey was designed by March Insight, the research arm of March Communications, and sponsored by Relayware. Fielding was facilitated by Precision Sample, LLC, and took place in H2 2016. Three hundred and nineteen (n=319) US-based channel managers took the survey, which was fielded online. The margin of error for the results is ± 5.5%.
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