You're asking, "What does Brad Pitt have to do with verbs, adjectives, and sales?" Stay with me. I promise this will make sense.
"Adapt or die."
~ Billy Beane to Grady Fuson, Moneyball
Beane (Bradd Pitt) was the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He revolutionized Major League Baseball by using data and math to assemble competitive teams on a limited budget. By focusing on overlooked metrics and undervalued players, he challenged traditional scouting practices and demonstrated the power of data-driven decision-making—in sports. Fuson was one of his scouts.
Watch this clip and enjoy.
Here's the key part of the script.
As you read it, replace "baseball" with "sales."
Think of Grady Fuson as a senior sales leader.
"Major League Baseball and its fans" are the board and the company's investors.
"Google boy" is... you'll get the idea.
BEANE: You're unhappy Grady, why?
GRADY: Wow! May I speak candidly?
BEANE: Sure, go ahead.
GRADY: Major League Baseball and its fans, they're going to be more than happy to throw you and Google boy under the bus if you keep doing what you're doing here. You don't put a team together with a computer, Billy.
BEANE: No?
GRADY: No. Baseball isn't just numbers. It's not science, if it was then anybody could do what we're doing. But they can't, because they don't know what we know. They don't have our experience, and they don't have our intuition.
BEANE: Okay.
GRADY: Billy, you got a kid in there that's got a degree in economics from Yale. You got a scout here with 29 years of baseball experience. You're listening to the wrong one. Now there are intangibles that only baseball people understand. You're discounting what Scouts have done for 150 years? Even yourself?
BEANE: Adapt or die
Are you relying on eminence-based sales wisdom—like the scouts in Moneyball? Are you looking at things like:
Pipeline coverage
Activity
Stage-to-stage conversion rates
Forecast category rollups
Sales velocity
Pipeline waterfalls
...
These look like decision-making KPIs.
But they don't work. Never did.
Why? Because these are adjectives. They just describe something that happened. They are not predictive of anything you care about—although some of them appear to be. And some are not easily controllable.
Helpful sales math is about verbs that act on things you control and that directly affect your sales. And then predicting the effects of making changes. Some verb (phrases):
Advance deals
Grow deal sizes
Add opportunities (quantity, values are fiction until late stages)
Increase win rates
It's not rocket science. Adjectives are embellishments. They try to make rocket-science out of something very simple. They confuse.
Here are some examples of verbs and their predicted effects:
"If you advance this deal to the next stage, you'll increase your odds of getting to your goal from 10% to 30%."
"Add one more deal-start per week in this market segment and your expected sales grow by 20% next year."
Adjectives or verbs.
Describe what happened or sell more. Your choice.
Still wondering who is "Google boy?"
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