It’s time to face reality – analytics is no longer a nicety, but very much a necessity.

Sales analytics and advanced sports analytics were once seen as relative luxuries, designed to even the playing field. Over the past few years, analytics has proliferated widely and evolved to the point where they are no longer luxuries that even the playing field – rather, they are necessities. If you operate without them, you will fall behind the competition.

Let’s see what’s happening across the three most popular professional sports in the United States:

• Baseball – Instead of looking at traditional stats like home run totals or runs batted in, scouts and baseball managers are putting a heavier emphasis on other less-heralded statistics…such as on-base percentage. OBP takes into account the likelihood of a batter getting on base by whatever means necessary (including hits, walks or hit-by-pitches). Look at the case of free agent outfielder Shin-Soo Choo – after ranking 4th in all of baseball last season with a .423 OBP, Choo scored himself a massive contract, signing with the Texas Rangers for 7 years and $130 million.

• Basketball – NBA teams that used to place an inordinate priority on taking mid-range jump shots are now recognizing more efficient ways of generating a high-powered offense – namely, taking more three-pointers, especially from the shorter corners. Today, NBA teams attempt 5.48 corner threes per team per game, a 134 % increase from 1997, when they took only 2.34 per team per game.

• Football – NFL coaches are traditionally a risk-averse group, a weakness that rears its ugly head when faced with the dilemma of going for it on 4th down. Carolina Panthers head coach Ron Rivera was the second-most conservative coach in terms of going for it on 4th down through the first 2.5 years (34 games) of his NFL coaching career. Last season? After admitting to studying the analytics, Rivera turned his team into one of the most aggressive on 4th down, converting at 76.9%, third-best in the league.

If 29 teams in each respective league are signing up players with the highest OBPs, launching more corner threes and going for it on 4th down, and you’re the only team that doesn’t, well that puts you at quite a competitive disadvantage doesn’t it? No longer can organizations cry ignorance, disinformation or a lack of available resources – sports analytics are readily available to all, with the proper investments! If, as an owner or general manager of a sports team, you are not empowering your coaches and players to embrace the culture of advanced analytics, you are putting your team behind the curve and not enabling them to succeed.

Sales analytics is no different

Just as sports analytics was once used to even the playing field for teams without seemingly unlimited resources, so were sales analytics designed for smaller organizations to compete with Fortune 500 companies. Yet, just like in sports, sales analytics has undergone such mainstream proliferation that to be on the wrong side of the analytics curve is to shoot yourself in the foot.

Let’s consider the area of activity tracking, for starters.

Traditional organizations who didn’t put an emphasis on driving efficiency through sales analytics had their reps log activities such as number of dials or emails sent in Salesforce. Sales organizations on the cutting edge took it one step further, looking at sales activity conversion rates to better understand their sales process.

Knowing how many calls each rep on your team logged in any given month is interesting, but hardly insightful. Knowing how many calls each rep made, how many meetings were sourced from those calls and how many of those meetings led directly to deals? Now THAT is actionable insight that can dictate more efficient decisions going forward.

Or about sales funnel analysis.

• Bad sales managers won’t even know their conversion rates from one stage to the next, all the way down the funnel.

• Average sales managers might know their conversion rates from stage to stage.

• The BEST sales managers? They not only know their stage conversion rates, but they also know what each rep’s individual sales funnels look like, and can compare that rep’s sales funnel to the company’s average.

Would you want to be a bad sales manager trying to out-sell your competitor who has access to reams of sales analytics and all the helpful and actionable insight that comes with all that data?

Didn’t think so.

Stop treating sales analytics as a nicety. Start adopting it as a necessity, and give yourself a fighting chance to compete for championships.