The movie Moneyball opens today to some great reviews such as this one at Sports Illustrated. I read the book by Michael Lewis soon after it was released and as a quant I found the story fascinating. What a great pair Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta were that came together at the right time! What I liked about the story was just like predictive analytics, all the statistics focused on solving one problem, and that is getting the best trade-off against a precise outcome. In this case, get the most wins with the least money — aka, Return on Investment. It was the book I would give to our sales managers saying “Like sports? Like making money? Here’s a book for you!” Here we’ll not review the book, the movie or Brad Pitt’s performance. Instead I’d like to share what we can learn about building a great sales team using analytics: DEFINE THE RIGHT METRICS It took a series of calculated steps to determine that wins were driven not by batting average but on-base and slugging percentage. How did they discover that? Set the outcome first and then run “simulations” of various predictors until one comes the closest. For sales managers, if exceeding quota is the desired outcome, …Read More