With no small thanks to Michael Lewis’ best-selling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game and 2011 movie adaptation starring Brad Pitt, Billy Beane’s revolutionary quest for the secret of success in baseball has become something of analytical legend.

Beyond baseball, the Moneyball Effect has gone mainstream. The disruptive potential of smart data has sent shockwaves across industries, and digital marketing is no exception. As Matt Heinz told us in an interview earlier this year, over the next five years “more of the successful marketers will come from the Moneyball mold.”

Marketing is more of a science now than ever before, but the race to analyze means some companies risk losing sight of the big picture. What’s worth measuring, and what isn’t? How can marketers ensure that analytics help more than they hinder?

What Does Moneyball Marketing Look Like In Practice?

To understand the true markings of a Moneyball Marketer, we brought together three industry leaders to debate the right balance between analytics and innovation: Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing; Joe Chernov, VP of Content at HubSpot; and Meghan Gill, Director of Marketing at MondoDB.

Moderating the panel, former Eloqua CEO Joe Payne cut straight to the analytical heart of the matter at hand, asking, “What are the one or two metrics that you measure that are critical for your organization?”

For Matt Heinz, the metric that takes precedence over all others is revenue contribution. “The metric that we mostly focus on with the marketing groups we work with is sales pipeline contribution. One of the most exciting things I am seeing happen in marketing groups is a move away from measuring MQLs, or marketing qualified leads, as their primary measure, and more towards sales qualified leads.”

“Ultimately, the company has a revenue goal, and we’re responsible for helping achieve that,” echoed Gill. “When it comes to data, it’s easy to overcomplicate things. I think the question is, how can you align on a few key metrics so that you’re not drowning in data? Sometimes the simple solution is the simple metrics that we’re going to look at continuously, and really align on.”

The challenge for many aspiring moneyball marketers, Payne noted, is what to do when data conflicts with your marketing intuition. Joe Chernov offered three solutions for when a marketer’s head and gut don’t align:

1. Ask: Are we measuring the right thing? “If it’s a piece of content that’s designed to generate awareness, but you’re measuring it on sales created, there’s a mismatch.”
2. Ask: Are we measuring it at the right time? “If you have a six months sales cycle, and you’re measuring results on month one, then it hasn’t had time to marinate.”
3. Be open to unexpected KPIs. “Be open to attaching some new KPI that you might not have considered initially.”

For more on Moneyball Marketing from Heinz, Chernov, Gill, and Payne, watch their complete session from the 2014 TrackMaven Marketing Summit below:

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