The Budget Cut That Feels Like a Win at First
There is a particular satisfaction to cutting a budget line that cannot cleanly prove its own worth in terms leadership recognizes.
Stripped of context and perspective, the reasons add up:
It does not generate a direct revenue figure.
It does not produce a lockable ratio of spend to outcome (no clean “$X invested equals Y% share of voice, equals Z closed deals”).
It has been in the budget long enough that nobody can remember who approved it first or why.
It appears, in the most generous possible reading, like a habitual spend. So you cut it and count it as savings. You see the quarterly and annual spend stabilize. Pats on the back all around.
And for a while, nothing breaks.
Let’s rotate the image a little bit though. Shine it through a baseball lens.
Using baseball as a lens for marketing spend
First Lesson: Classic Sports Film Moneyball.
The Oakland A’s front office, pre-Moneyball, had applied two constraints as hard boundaries:
A small roster budget (team payroll) relative to their league competition, while maintaining the same goal (World Series Championship).
Allocating significant chunks of that budget toward players whose value was measured in the traditional signals the market had agreed to price (batting average, stolen bases, physical presence, name recognition).
The traditional signals were not invented metrics. They were real and available to every team and every reporter. These were the longstanding KPIs the market had at the center of its player valuation model. KPIs most familiar to the teams’ top stakeholders. KPIs used by agents and scouts to sketch out contracts.
What the data showed (data that had been sitting in the records the whole time) was that on-base percentage predicted run production far more reliably than the glamorous numbers everyone had been pricing.
Vanity Metrics vs Strategic Metrics
As-yet-underrated metrics that made stakeholders’ eyelids heavy feeding prediction models that looked like EKG readouts and landed like announcements from Charlie Brown’s teacher:
walks
hit-by-pitches
the quiet cumulative work of not making outs
Now these metrics were available all along. They’d gone undervalued because the market had not yet seen the need to model around them. Quite frankly, the other metrics seemed to be working, and the old adage (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) had proved to hold for other teams.
Double Issue at Hand: Acquisition and Retention
Stakeholders urged the use of roster budget in a competitive and recognizable way, without providing adequate budget for that traditional approach.
The implied solution: draft good players, develop them into strong players who win games, and also somehow keep them when better-funded teams come calling with bigger checks. On that budget. Good luck.
Thus, the budget had not been wasted on bad players in previous years. It was misallocated toward traditional inputs that felt like performance drivers but were not actually driving the outcome that mattered.
Digging for a New Solution
Billy Beane hit the same wall as in previous seasons, intensified with a new constraint. No budget increase, predictable poaching from his roster, and a mandate from stakeholders that another losing season would not be favorable for his future with the team.
Faced with this set of stakes, he did not just pull out the shears and cut the expensive players. Did he offer up a couple of high-ticket-price players for trades that initially struck other teams as odd? Sure.
And then redeployed budget from poached players toward what actually moved the game performance number. Those bits of recovered budget went to undervalued players whose contribution was real, measurable, and available, just ignored by a market still pricing the usual signals.
Budget Resets Instead of Budget Cuts
Throughout that transformative season, the insight he exploited was not about thrift. It was about correctly identifying which spend was load bearing and redeploying accordingly.
And it eventually changed how the rest of the league had to think about player valuation.
The marketing parallel is not hard to find. Review those same annual budget line-item cuts and you may just find budget misallocated toward the metrics leadership can recognize, while the complementary spend that actually fills the funnel goes undefended and eventually unbudgeted.
Now consider a different problem in a different environment.
Traditional is not always the winning approach
Second Lesson: Savannah Bananas Story
When the Savannah Sand Gnats left for Columbia, South Carolina in September 2015, Savannah lost its minor league baseball team. The Coastal Plain League moved quickly to fill the vacancy, announcing a new collegiate summer team that would begin play the following year.
The window between announcement and opening day was months, not years. Was there an inherited fanbase? Debatable, but I would argue no.
New Fanbase, Who Dis?
This new, quite literally no-name team had no established ticket demand, and no particular reason for a local market that had just watched one team leave to show up for another.
Fans First Entertainment (ownership & stakeholders) did not reach for the traditional minor league ticket sales equation (player performance feeds local reputation feeds attendance). That model was not going to generate the demand the organization needed at that scale and in that timeline.
Instead, they made a deliberate stakeholder prioritization decision. Their operating philosophy, which they named explicitly:
“The crowd in attendance is the primary product stakeholder.”
Not competitive metrics, not league convention, not the ownership suite. The fan experience (the fun, the spectacle, the memorable moment of being there) was the thing being optimized for.
Building from Local Brand Ownership
Before the team had a name, they ran a naming contest. This turned a potentially boring and private branding exercise into a pre-launch demand-generation mechanic.
It was an ingenious move that converted passive local awareness into active fan investment before a single ticket was sold. Those who voted on the team name had skin in the game by opening night.
The spend being prioritized at this stage was attention and belonging. For the first game of the season, they walked out to a sold-out crowd. What looked like just building vibes was actually quite measurable:
The naming contest had entries.
Ticket sales had a timeline trend.
Games had attendance figures.
News coverage had subscriber bases and distribution.
Team content had reach and share rates, and social community.
Value Generation through Customer Connection
Each metric was already a KPI in its own right. They just were not the ones a traditional sports ownership group may have recognized as load bearing for a collegiate team.
In their inaugural 2016 season, the Savannah Bananas ranked second in average attendance among 160 summer collegiate teams. By 2023, they had more TikTok followers than any MLB team.
And the operating model that looked like a novelty eventually outgrew the league that had, in spite of its misgivings, begun to adopt their crowd-pleasing approach.
Striving for data-informed decisions
Getting to the Point: Not Settling for Shortcuts
The two cases shown here address distinctly different problems.
Moneyball is a competitive repositioning story: an organization with existing market presence misallocating budget against the wrong performance drivers while competitors priced the same signals the same way.
The Savannah Bananas is a go-to-market story with a hard window: a new entrant with no inherited equity needing to generate demand before the first game was played.
Each leader was operating under different starting conditions, timeline pressure, and strategic context.
BUT.
They applied the same underlying discipline: correctly identifying which spend was actually fueling impact, and funding it accordingly, even when the current revenue model did not have a line item for it yet.
What appears at first glance to be a couple of sports stories actually blooms into two compelling resource allocation stories that happen to have scoreboards.
When Infrastructure Gets Mistaken for Decor
So, here is why the clean cut feels safe for longer than it should when you’re battling resource constraints.
Persuasion infrastructure produces measurable upstream effects that many legacy revenue models have not been built to recognize.
Pipeline-enabling KPIs often look routine from the outside: branded search volume, direct traffic, category keyword positioning, unaided awareness, brand sentiment.
These are leading indicators of future revenue, but they do not show up on the direct revenue line, and the less-extensive attribution models are not including them.
Delayed ROI Droop
Let’s say you remove that seemingly fluff spend. The pipeline wouldn’t dry up immediately.
You’ve got leads already in motion and those keep moving. Your existing client and network relationships stay warm. The routine revenue indicators look fine.
And slowly but surely the funnel entrance narrows as fewer prospects recognize you and competitors have already filled the space you vacated.
So now that the pipeline consequence is visible in the numbers that stakeholders watch (higher acquisition costs, heavier reliance on intermediaries, slower absorption on new offerings, share of voice relinquished to competitors who kept spending), and the budget reduction decision that caused it is 6 to 12 months in the rearview.
Rightfully, that budget cut decision did not feel like a mistake when it was made. At the time, it felt like financial discipline: right-sizing a budget where infrastructure looked like complacency and potential waste.
The mistake only becomes legible once the cost arrives in the revised revenue forecast. This is also where it gets interesting.
Opportunity: Data-Driven Budget Strategy
The cut is not necessarily the failure. Misreading which spend is a piece of critical infrastructure is not uncommon, particularly for leadership that is closer to the revenue line than to the marketing function.
Metrics that clearly show up as performance drivers are not always the only ones doing the pipeline-loading work. And to be honest, it can benefit a leadership team to poke at certain structural spends to confirm they are still critical as the organization grows.
The danger is in doubling down once the consequence arrives.
The best leaders (the ones that make us excited to build marketing functions together) do not need the original call to have been right.
When the delayed consequence surfaces, they zoom out and in, take stock of what they are actually looking at, connect it as accurately as possible to its cause, and take action.
That reversal is not an admission of failure. In fact, that’s competence stepping in, recognizing a misread, redeploying correctly, and sequencing the recovery with both the immediate need and the longer term in mind. That’s a leader who is headed to new heights.
When Indirect Spend Fits into Efficient Spend
Indirect spend is not the same as habitual or wasteful spend. The determinant difference is whether that line item is doing revenue enabling work that the current model is not yet built to see.
Beane chose not to rehash the same player acquisition approach by nickel-and-diming his budget and hoping for better results. He cut misallocated spend and redeployed it toward what actually drove the outcome, using data the market had been downplaying.
The Savannah Bananas did not have the option to chase the traditional local promotion ticket sales equation. They identified the most powerful stakeholder, built a demand generation engine around that decision before the season started, and funded the spend that caused the opportunity alongside the spend that closed the deal.
Both required someone in the room willing to ask a question most important to revenue models regardless of their current metric inputs:
“Which spend is adding potential customers into the funnel (so they can enter the pipeline) in the first place?”
That question is worth asking before the consequence arrives. It is considerably more expensive to ask it afterward, in crisis mode.
If you’ve hit that point already? Probably best to do an honest marketing audit.
