So with my belly full of turkey and my body recovering from a fun Winter vacation in Winnipeg, I found myself sitting on an airplane watching the movie Moneyball. I got pretty caught up in the storyline. Coming off a disappointing post season loss to the New York Yankees, and losing several star players to free agency, the Oakland A’s are faced with the challenge of rebuilding their team to be competitive. To make matters worse, GM, Billy Beane has a third of the money to work with than the New York Yankees.
The scene that captured my imagination happens early when the GM meets with his scouting team and they talk about how they are going to replace the star players. The GM responds by “We’ve got to think differently”. He proceeds by building a team on the premise of on base percentage (OBP). There are trials, but in the end, the theory is vindicated with some amazing results.
In this economy, when it comes to communicating with our customers, “We’ve got to think differently”. We spend most of our time defending and executing things the way we always have. Many of us spend all kinds of money to kill trees and send out material that our customers don’t want and don’t read. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can reduce costs by moving financial communications and transactional documents online. We can improve the customer experience by streamlining what we send out, making it relevant and interactive.
For Billy Beane the game changed when he used OBP to measure the value of each player on his team. In the same way, we begin to think differently when we take stock of our communications and bring a relentless insistence that every piece have a measurable purpose. When we identify and prioritize the opportunities this presents, it changes the game…completely.
Happy New Year from the team at Blue ID.
