Field Manuals How To Start The Machine Lesson VI

Fine-Tune Moneyball’s Settings

Set the business rules that tell Moneyball how to think about inactive accounts, mature customer value, stale deals, dates, and rep visibility.

Lesson 6 of 6 10 min

Part I

Start With The Defaults If You Are Unsure

Moneyball ships with reasonable defaults. Most teams can start there, get some real usage under their belt, and come back later once the reports have prompted better questions.

These settings do not change your CRM. They tell Moneyball how to interpret your business: when a customer should be considered inactive, when LTV is mature enough to trust, how to handle stale open deals, what timezone to use, and who can view whose Moneyball pages.

There are two places to visit:

Part II

PIA Inactivity Months

Moneyball uses a metric we call PIA. It segments accounts into three groups:

  • Prospects — accounts that have not bought yet.
  • Actives — accounts with recent won business.
  • Inactives — accounts that bought before, but have not bought again within your inactivity window.

Going from Prospect to Active is straightforward: you win a deal with the account. Inactive is where the business judgment comes in.

Moneyball works from the idea that once someone becomes a customer, they are not automatically a customer forever. Churn happens. Competitors show up. Contacts leave. Priorities change. The business landscape does what the business landscape does, usually while pretending it had a plan.

PIA Inactivity Months controls how many months can pass without a won deal before Moneyball treats a past customer as inactive.

The default is 24 months. Two years of no won business is a good starting point for many companies.

A useful rule of thumb: choose the smaller of these two numbers:

  • How long should a typical healthy customer go without needing any more of your services?
  • How long might it take for a customer to forget about you, change internally, lose your contacts, or become meaningfully at risk?

If the first answer is 18 months and the second answer is 24 months, start with 18. If you are not sure, leave it at 24 and revisit after you have seen Moneyball in action.

Part III

LTV Maturity Months

Moneyball also tracks LTV: the lifetime value of different kinds of customers.

LTV Maturity Months tells Moneyball how long to wait before a customer is mature enough to include in LTV calculations. The default is 12 months.

Why wait? Because brand-new customers are not finished stories. If you just landed 100 new customers, they will probably have lower LTV today than customers who have been with you for ten years. That does not mean the new customers are bad. It means they have not had time to buy again yet.

A useful rule of thumb: pick the point where a new customer has had a fair chance to make their first normal follow-on purchase.

The one wrinkle in this:
shorter windows make Moneyball react to change faster, while longer windows make the LTV view more stable. That can get complicated quickly. If you are unsure, leave this at 12 months and let the first few months of reports teach you whether it should move.

Part IV

Organization Timezone

Set your organization timezone so Moneyball knows how to interpret dates and times consistently.

Some data sources are kind enough to include precise timezone information. Others are less generous. Setting the timezone helps Moneyball avoid small but annoying date problems, especially around close dates, created dates, and reporting cutoffs.

Pick the timezone your business uses for sales reporting. If your company is spread across several timezones, choose the one leadership uses when looking at pipeline.

Part V

Auto-Close Lost Threshold

Part of Moneyball’s automatic cleanup is dealing with stale open deals.

Auto-Close Lost Threshold controls how many months a deal can sit past its close date before Moneyball treats it as lost. The default is 6 months.

The idea is simple: if a deal’s close date is six months in the past and it is still open, that is usually a sign the deal went bad and someone — no names, we are professionals here — did not want to report the bad news.

Make this shorter if your team keeps a tight pipeline and old open deals should be treated aggressively. Make it longer if your sales cycle is slow, deals regularly drift, or close dates are more aspirational than contractual.

If you are unsure, 6 months is a reasonable place to start.

Part VI

Default Close Date Offset

Sometimes a rep does not set a close date. It happens. The machine detests this, but it happens.

Default Close Date Offset tells Moneyball what close date to assume when one is missing. The default is 3 months after the deal was created.

Set this close to your normal open-to-close timeline. If most deals take about 90 days, 3 months is fine. If your deals usually take 6 months, increase it. If they usually close in 30 days, shorten it.

This does not fix missing close dates in your CRM. It gives Moneyball a reasonable working assumption until the CRM admin, sales ops person, or blessed data cleaner notices the discrepancy. If you have a dedicated data cleaner, please buy them a kazoo and a cake.

Part VII

Default Service Name

Heaven forbid: a deal with no service or product attached. Say it is not so. And yet, here we are.

Default Service Name is the label Moneyball uses when it cannot find a service or product for a deal. The default is Other.

You usually do not need to touch this. Change it only if your team prefers a different label for missing or unknown service data.

Part VIII

Moneyball App Access

Open Admin → Apps → Moneyball to choose how broadly reps can view Moneyball pages.

There are two options.

Allow reps to view other reps

This lets reps open other reps’ Moneyball pages when they navigate to them.

This is the broader visibility option. It also allows users who are not mapped as a sales rep or configured as a sales manager to still use Moneyball, because the app is not restricted to only their own mapped rep view.

Choose this if your team is comfortable with more open visibility, peer comparison, or shared territory review.

Keep reps on their own view only

This keeps reps on their own Moneyball territory unless they are configured as managers.

This is the tighter visibility option. In this mode, users generally need to be mapped to a sales rep or configured as a sales manager to use the relevant Moneyball views.

Choose this if reps should only see their own view, while managers see the reps assigned to them.

Part IX

You Are Done

If you are not sure about any of these values, use the defaults and revisit them after Moneyball has been in use for a bit.

You can tune business rules later. You can adjust access later. You can revisit defaults once real reports start showing you what matters.

The machine is not carved in stone. It is tuned over time.