I am a baseball fan. I am also a marketing professional. It is October, which means that the World Series is being played to determine the champion for the 2018 season. As I have watched baseball, I find that there are a lot of similarities between the sport and marketing.

The necessary equipment

It amazes me how fast major league pitchers can throw a baseball. An average fastball is thrown over 90 miles per hour. It is not uncommon to see a pitcher heave a ball at 100 mph! When I was a young player on my Little League team, I wanted to be a catcher. My coach gave me a try and I soon discovered that it was harder than it looked. For one, you have to have special equipment to be a catcher, including a mask and helmet, shin guards, and a chest protector to guard against foul balls that could hit you. That can be rather bulky and I found it hard to move around, but it is necessary. However the most important piece of equipment is a catcher’s mitt. It is unlike any other baseball glove. It has more padding and less webbing. Now it would be unwise for a baseball catcher to try to go into a game without his equipment on, but most unthinkable if he were to leave his catcher’s mitt in the dugout and try to bare-hand catch 100 mph fastballs!

Marketing is like that catcher’s mitt. It is the necessary equipment that is needed in the sales process. Without it, sales efforts are greatly hampered. A sales pitch without marketing to back it up is wasted effort. Marketing sets the parameters for sales. It sets the strategy to gain sales. It gives sales its target. Just like a catcher working with a pitcher, good marketing sets the sales staff up for success.

RBI and ROI

Baseball is a game of statistics. It is probably the most analyzed sport, with managers studying advanced metrics on every player. Where does a batter typically hit? Does he like the ball high or low in the strike zone? Does he hit lefties or righties better? What is his batting average? What is his OBP (On-base Percentage), his OPS (On-base Plus Slugging Percentage), his WAR (Wins Above Replacement)? However many analytics you want to generate to evaluate a specific player, there is only one that really matters: RBIs (Runs Batted In). Baseball is an easy game to understand. Whichever team scores the most runs wins the game. So it would stand that whoever can bat more runs in is the most valuable player on your team.

Modern marketing is also full of all kinds of analytics. Sometimes we can get bogged down in all the metrics of marketing to try to declare success. But there is one statistic that rises above all the rest when it comes to marketing in business: ROI (Return On Investment). All marketing should be designed to generate leads that result in sales. At the end of the day, that is the unpretentious job of marketing. The money spent on marketing should generate a lot of business for your company. If it is not happening, you need to take a good look at your marketing message and the methods you are using to deliver your message. Just like a manager would decide to pull a slumping batter in favor of a run producer, marketing has to be able to produce new business for your company. You could say that ROI is the RBI of business.

A good strategy wins games and marketing strategy wins new customers

The head baseball coach is called a manager. That is a good description, because they are the person who sets the strategy for the players which is implemented by the coaches on the staff as the game is played. A good manager listens to the feedback he receives from his coaches. Then they make adjustments based on what is happening during the game.

Marketing is at its best when you have a strategic plan in place, but can make adjustments to that plan based on what is happening in the marketplace. That requires you to implement your plan and evaluate its effectiveness, much like a baseball manager would assess the success of a pitcher during a game, knowing when to take him out and replace him with a reliever. Nothing in marketing works forever. You need to be able to change when the time is right.

Marketing and baseball have a lot in common. Hall of Fame baseball manager, Sparky Anderson, said this, "Baseball is a simple game. If you have good players and if you keep them in the right frame of mind then the manager is a success.” Sparky could have been a marketing manager.

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This is part one of a two-part series. To see part two, click here.