The CRM Moneyball Moment

Summary

MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Episode: The CRM Moneyball Moment Release Date: February 11, 2025

Hosts: Benjamin Shapiro and Val Riley

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Introduction

In the latest episode of the MarTech Podcast™, host Benjamin Shapiro engages in a compelling conversation with Val Riley, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Unbound. The discussion delves into the strategic acquisition of Insightly by Unbound and explores the innovative concept of the "CRM Moneyball Moment." Drawing parallels from the renowned "Moneyball" strategy in baseball, Val and Benjamin uncover how data-driven approaches within Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can unlock hidden potential and drive substantial business growth.

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Unbound’s Acquisition of Insightly

[01:15] Benjamin Shapiro

"Today we're going to discuss CRM acquisitions from our tech. Joining us is Val Riley who is the VP of Marketing and Strategy at Unbound..."

Val Riley begins by outlining Unbound's recent acquisition of Insightly, highlighting how this strategic move positions Unbound to enhance its CRM capabilities. Insightly, known for its robust CRM solutions, brings a wealth of data management and customer lifecycle expertise to Unbound, enabling the company to offer more tailored and effective solutions to modern businesses.

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Understanding the CRM Moneyball Moment

The conversation transitions to the central theme of the episode: the "CRM Moneyball Moment."

[02:26] Val Riley

"There are Moneyball moments in everyone's CRM. You have to dig through the data to uncover it, just like they did in the movie."

Val explains that similar to how the Oakland A's used data analytics to identify undervalued players and build a competitive team, businesses can leverage their CRM data to discover overlooked opportunities. These "Moneyball moments" are instances where hidden patterns or insights within CRM data can lead to significant business advancements.

[04:11] Benjamin Shapiro

"Look for people that get on base... If you're not a baseball fan, look for the micro win."

Benjamin elaborates on the concept by emphasizing the importance of focusing on consistent, small-scale successes within CRM data. Instead of chasing large, uncertain opportunities ("home run hitters"), businesses should identify and capitalize on numerous minor wins that collectively enhance performance and growth.

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Uncovering the Secret Sauce: Getting More from CRM Data

The discussion deepens as Val outlines the "secret sauce" for maximizing CRM data utility.

[04:55] Val Riley

"The ingredient is quite simply a custom field, but the custom field with a little bit of automation to it."

Using a practical example, Val describes how a manufacturer in Indiana utilized custom fields and automation within Insightly to track used equipment sales. By creating a custom field that auto-populates equipment categories and implementing email automations, the company was able to significantly increase sales of used equipment. This approach demonstrates how tailored data fields and automated processes can transform raw CRM data into actionable business strategies.

[07:23] Benjamin Shapiro

"Get the data, build a custom field to extract it, make sure that it can be searched for, and then have some way to automate that into something that can be customer-facing."

Benjamin synthesizes Val's example into a clear recipe for achieving a CRM Moneyball moment: gather relevant data, customize fields for extraction, ensure the data is searchable, and automate its integration into customer-facing platforms. This systematic approach enables businesses to harness their CRM data effectively.

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Balancing CRM Automation vs. Time Spent in CRM

Val and Benjamin then tackle the debate on whether businesses should prioritize CRM automation or invest more time in manually working with CRM data to find hidden insights.

[08:32] Val Riley

"There's so much that's in there. You just need to unearth what's already in there... it's buried in places that aren't searchable or discoverable."

Val argues that the key lies in uncovering the latent data within existing CRM systems rather than solely relying on automation. He insists that valuable insights are already present in CRM records but often remain inaccessible due to poor data organization.

[09:07] Benjamin Shapiro

"You have the tools, we have the technology, we have artificial intelligence... it's a little bit of both."

Benjamin concurs, highlighting the importance of a hybrid approach. Automation and AI can streamline data extraction and initial analysis, freeing up time for sales leaders to delve deeper into the nuances and strategic implications of the findings. This combination ensures both efficiency and depth in uncovering valuable CRM insights.

[10:15] Val Riley

"AI doesn't have the eye that the sales director does. So I'll agree with you. It's a little bit of both."

Val emphasizes the complementary roles of automation and human expertise, noting that while AI can handle data processing, the strategic interpretation still benefits from human oversight.

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, Val and Benjamin reflect on the importance of data-driven strategies in CRM.

[10:36] Benjamin Shapiro

"If you want that CRM Moneyball moment, you have to have the sign, right? You have to have a hypothesis."

Benjamin underscores the necessity of a scientific approach—formulating hypotheses and testing them against CRM data to continuously discover and capitalize on new opportunities.

[11:01] Val Riley

"I would agree."

Val concurs, reinforcing the value of systematic data analysis in achieving sustained business growth.

[11:15] Val Riley

"Catch me on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with all the listeners of the Martech podcast and we can learn from each other."

The episode concludes with an invitation for listeners to connect and continue the conversation, emphasizing the community aspect of shared knowledge in marketing and technology.

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Key Takeaways

1. Strategic Acquisitions Enhance CRM Capabilities: Unbound's acquisition of Insightly exemplifies how strategic moves can bolster a company's CRM offerings, enabling more personalized and effective customer relationship management.

2. CRM Moneyball Moments Unlock Hidden Potential: By adopting a data-driven approach akin to the Moneyball strategy, businesses can identify and leverage underutilized opportunities within their CRM systems to drive growth.

3. Customized Data Fields and Automation are Crucial: Implementing custom fields and automated processes within CRM systems can transform raw data into actionable insights, facilitating significant business improvements.

4. Balanced Approach Between Automation and Manual Analysis: A hybrid strategy that combines the efficiency of automation with the strategic insight of human analysis is essential for uncovering and capitalizing on valuable CRM data.

5. Continuous Hypothesis Testing Drives Success: Establishing hypotheses and systematically testing them against CRM data fosters an environment of continuous discovery and improvement, leading to sustained business success.

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Notable Quotes

• Val Riley [02:26]: "There are Moneyball moments in everyone's CRM. You have to dig through the data to uncover it, just like they did in the movie."

• Benjamin Shapiro [04:11]: "Look for people that get on base... If you're not a baseball fan, look for the micro win."

• Val Riley [04:55]: "The ingredient is quite simply a custom field, but the custom field with a little bit of automation to it."

• Benjamin Shapiro [07:23]: "Get the data, build a custom field to extract it, make sure that it can be searched for, and then have some way to automate that into something that can be customer-facing."

• Benjamin Shapiro [10:36]: "If you want that CRM Moneyball moment, you have to have the sign, right? You have to have a hypothesis."

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This episode of the MarTech Podcast™ offers invaluable insights into leveraging CRM systems through a data-centric approach, inspired by the Moneyball philosophy. By effectively mining CRM data and balancing automation with strategic analysis, businesses can uncover hidden opportunities that drive substantial growth and success.

Transcript

[Benjamin Shapiro]

The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.

From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs.

[Val Riley]

Better than TV advertising.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that used to technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss CRM acquisitions from our tech. Joining us is Val Riley who is the VP of Marketing and Strategy at Unbound, which helps modern businesses of all sizes build lifelong customer relationships and grow faster than ever before with their out of the box capabilities that are tailored towards each user experiences for every customer facing role. And today Val and I are going to discuss a couple different topics, but we're going to start off talking about Unbound's acquisition of Insightly. All right, I want to move on to our second topic which we're calling Finding the Moneyball moment. So Val, now that we're turning the page, you've been working at a CRM company for a long time and now have a broader focus, not just CRM but more entire customer life cycle working at Unbounce. Let's do this. I want you to explain what the CRM Money Mall moment is. Let's do. We're both baseball fans here and it's Moneyball. So I think the obvious thing to do is explain what a CRM Moneyball moment is like. I was a sad Oakland A's fan.

[Val Riley]

I'm a college sports fan, so I'm just going to go from college baseball.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

But I think what we should do actually to start this off for anybody who's not a sports fan or has had their head under the pillow for a long time, the Oakland A's owner decided to move the team to Vegas even though nobody in Vegas wants them for money. And now all of a sudden Oakland has no sports team, even though it's a Bay Area sports team that's been around forever, long history, and everybody's sad. Sorry, Val, go ahead. There's your context.

[Val Riley]

All right, so the concept of the book Moneyball, and there was a subsequent movie, and even if you're not a sports fan, if you're a Brad Pitt fan, you probably saw it. But the concept is that there is stuff that's being overlooked that has a great deal of potential. In the movie, it's baseball players. They don't have the glory, they don't have the following, but they're solid performers. Solid enough. In fact, if you put them together, they end up winning. But it takes someone who understands data to uncover it. And that's how Jonah Hill gets to be a hero. So super interesting.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Not in real life, although I'm sure Jonah Hill is very popular in real life.

[Val Riley]

So what I'm contending is that there are Moneyball moments in everyone's CRM. You have to dig through the data to uncover it, just like they did in the movie. I mean, the knock on salespeople, Ben, is always like, they don't update the CRM. And honestly, I'm just calling BS on that. They do. I've worked with well over a hundred sales reps in my career, and 95% of them are doing the work. They do it. They're just really victims of CRMs that don't collect data and organize data in a meaningful way. So that activity can feel very pointless. The software is bad. Maybe the implementation is bad, maybe the onboarding was bad. But if it's done right, there are Moneyball moments in there.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Yeah, I always think of the Moneyball moment as. I'll use baseball as the example. Don't look for home run hitters. Don't look for gut instinct. Look for data and KPIs and metrics that show positive performance and that when you put enough of them together, your small wins, that equals to a better performance and a better product. So essentially, look for people that get on base. Somebody that walks a lot a walks as good as a hit. If you're not a baseball fan, look for the micro win. So let's move on. I want to go on into something that we call secret sauce. Give me the ingredients that are what you need to put together to get more out of your existing CRM data.

[Val Riley]

I think it's best described with an example because the ingredients aren't sexy, but the example kind of makes it a little sexy. So we have a customer in Indiana that manufactures equipment, big machines, big pieces of equipment for packaging and processing really expensive stuff. And people like you and me probably don't realize this, but there's an aftermarket for those machines. So let's say a business buys some custom equipment. Maybe you're a bakery and you want to be able to twirl your dough, or you're a packaging company and you want to be able to package equipment, package stuff fast or whatever, but then you upgrade to a larger size or you need more capacity. Right. So you go and you order a new piece of equipment, but you want to liquidate the piece of equipment you already have. Right. You don't need that anymore, but you spent a lot of money on it, why not? Right. So the sales reps who are called in to sell new equipment, they're collecting data that the customer had on the equipment. They're looking to liquidate. Why not? They can get commission on it. So it's just in the notes though, and it's getting lost. So a few transactions happened where everybody made a lot of money on used equipment. And then that was a Moneyball moment. How can we get more from the used equipment business? That's what this customer asked. So it should be easy to do this in any CRM. It happens to be really easy to do it in Insightly. So you asked for the ingredient. The ingredient is quite simply a custom field, but the custom field with a little bit of automation to it. So they created this custom field, it auto populates the category of equipment based on the client and then they put the rep, puts the piece of equipment in this custom field. So right now the system every day pushes information about used equipment for sale to a live web page, all because of that custom field and that auto populated category. So every day this company has updated information about used equipment for sale on their site, just based on a custom field and an automation. Further, they set up some email automations that go to people who have interest in that category. So they're pushing emails saying, hey, newly listed this week, here's what equipment we have in packaging, here's what equipment we have in bakery, whatever, whatever your industry is. And so that used equipment page is updated, they're pushing emails, now they're selling used equipment like crazy just because the data was in the system, but it just wasn't being read and organized in any sort of way that made sense.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

All right, so if I'm putting my recipe together, here's what I'm hearing from you. You start with a data lake that's your flower and you put in your egg, custom field, your binding agent and then you need some water as well. Your search format, some way to sort of get that data into the right place or to be visualized. And then you lastly, you need some extra flavor. You need the ability to extract that data, your aut and push it forward. Somehow it makes it seem like I'm either making bread or noodles. But that basic ingredient of get the data, build a custom field to extract it, make sure that it can be searched for, and then have a way to automate that into something that can be customer facing is really how you create your CRM Moneyball moment. So I want to move on to one more segment that we call toss up. Tell me which one is more important. CRM automation or time spent working in your CRM? If you're looking for that Moneyball moment, are you just digging through the weeds or should you be focusing on process to try to unearth the things that are already there?

[Val Riley]

Gosh, there's so much that's in there. You just need to unearth what's already in there. Again, I just think it's BS that the reps aren't doing the work they are. They're putting things in there. It's just buried. It's buried in places that aren't searchable or discoverable. So if every sales director who could hear my voice just spent time going over the win loss notes of their last 20 or 30 deals, I guarantee they would come out with a Moneyball moment. I guarantee it. It's in there. It's just not in a way that is conducive to the fast pace that sales leaders work at.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I have good news. This is easier than it's ever been. You don't have to go through and read the chicken scratches from your sales rep as they are getting ready to pour themselves a bourbon after the end of a week. You don't have to try to interpret and understand. We have the tools, we have the technology, we have artificial intelligence. You know, I think about this for me, you know, in our sales process, understanding what happened. I don't even write my own notes anymore. I have a note taker that does it and then I can use the note taker and ask to scan through all the meetings and tell me what are the insights that I should be looking for. You can make it so much easier than it used to be. It's not manual processes anymore. So to me, I think the answer is a little bit of both. You should be spending time understanding what's happening and what are the notes and what are the nuances that are being put into your CRM. But it doesn't mean you have to do it manually. So I actually think it's a little bit of automation to extract the data in the format that you want first, and then you can spend more time figuring out what's in there and where the gold is mixed in with the dirt.

[Val Riley]

I would agree. I would say that there is probably a little bit of nuance. And when AI summarizes something for me, I love it. I really do. But there's still a part of me that's like, let me just double check. Let me just double check that it didn't miss anything. That's super nuanced, because AI doesn't have the eye that the sales director does. So I'll agree with you. It's a little bit of both.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It's a little bit of a chicken or the egg. You got to have the good data. You have to spend your time going through it. And if it's too much data, you have to figure out some automations to try to comb through all of it. But at the end of the day, if you want that CRM Moneyball moment, you have to have the sign, right? You have to have a hypothesis. It's a scientific approach to understanding what is not always a scientific process. And I think that's really what it comes down to.

[Val Riley]

I would agree.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

All right, Val, congratulations on the acquisition, the promotion. You've got a great podcast. Being our guest is wonderful. We're very grateful to have you here. It's been wonderful having you as our guest.

[Val Riley]

Absolutely. Catch me on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with all the listeners of the Martech podcast and we can learn from each other.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

All right, and that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to Val Riley, the VP of marketing at Insightly, now part of Unbounce. If you'd like to connect with Val, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can visit unbounce.com or you can find her podcast. Val, it's called Closing Time. Am I right?

[Val Riley]

It is loosely based on that 90s hit by the band Semisonic. So, yeah, Closing Time. Catch us on YouTube.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

All right, just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com. we've got summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, you can apply to be a guest speaker on the Martech podcast, and of course you can reach out on social media. Our handle is martechpod pretty much everywhere. You can catch me on LinkedIn. My handle is benjschaft b e n J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.

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