Dr. Barbara Weaver Smith is founder and CEO of The Whale Hunters®, co-author of Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company, based on the collaborative culture of the Inuit people who engaged their entire village to hunt whales, and author of Whale Hunting with Global Accounts. Barbara teaches small and midsize companies to greatly increase revenues and margins through a complete business development strategy for bigger deals with bigger customers.
She supports her clients’ success with a steady stream of new content for face-to-face and online engagements.
Barbara is in her third career. She was a professor and college dean, then president of a statewide nonprofit agency, before taking the entrepreneurial plunge in 1998. Her eclectic background has given her 20 years’ experience in leading diverse groups of stakeholders to create fantastic, purposeful projects for business, education and communities. And she has raised much more than $100 million in gifts, grants, and earned income to get them properly off the ground.
Barbara loves working with small/midsize companies to build the seamless processes that guarantee their continued growth, revenue, and profits. She also works with large corporations that need to become trusted advisors to their key clients or even to a whole new market of customers.
Barbara is a graduate of Anderson University and earned the MA and PhD at Ball State University. She was named Sagamore of the Wabash, Indiana’s highest civilian honor, for exceptional community programs throughout the state.