A lot of The Whale Hunters client companies believe they are playing in a totally price-driven market. They do not see any opportunities to compete other than on price. When they lose a deal, they assume they lost it on price.
The problems with that zero-sum game are that there are always limits to how low the market can drive prices (before vendors abandon the market) and that every vendor is vulnerable to price-cutting by any competitor at any time.
Video interviews with business leaders on how they evaluate and manage risk.
Conversation with Chris Baggott about "The Key to Fast Growth is Discoverability."
Nothing is more critical to the sustainable success of a business than its abilities to galvanize the organizational team around their accountabilities for growth. While so many businesses place a high emphasis and dependence upon the functional responsibility of the sales teams for their growth, sustainable businesses recognize that increases in revenues are best accomplished through the retention of existing clients and the efficiency with which their team attracts and converts new clients. Sustainable revenue growth is about focusing on developing and maintaining great relationships that add value to the firm and to the client. That is not a sales function—it is an organizational accountability.
Whale Hunting is a great strategy to grow your company fast. But even fast-growing companies make on average 80% of their revenue from existing clients. So it’s much more important to keep existing whales than to hunt for new ones. How do you find out if there is a high probability that existing whales will work with you next year, too?
When you combine expert facilitation with visual representations of the outcomes that were achieved in a collaborative manner, you have a living reminder of the work you accomplished together. And most important, you have a map that you can use to help the rest of your employees understand why it is important to change the way the company is doing something.
Each month we do our Expert Series call focused on growth and sales for small and medium sized businesses. This month, on July 20th at 12pm Eastern, we’re doing our free call with Compendium CEO, Chris Baggott .
Isn’t thought leader just old biz jargon? After all, the term’s been knocking around for years, like “headhunter” and “game changer” and “team player.”
But no, for a B2B company today, being known as a thought leader demands your attention. And fortunately, through social media, becoming a thought leader gets easier for small and midsize companies than ever before.
We are all working at a frenetic pace and when we aren’t reaching sales goals, we panic and work from a place of fear, rather than from a place of power. Instead of focusing on the “target” we tend to toss darts all over the board hoping we land anything, anywhere. The result is a lot of tossing and not a lot of points. In reality we are staying in the same place (or losing ground) and not shifting our business forward. In either case, we are expending a lot of energy for little results. This is especially true in going after bigger deals because of the complexities of the sale and the nuances of the buying decision.
A lot of small companies adopt a mantra of “Think Big, Act Big” as a way to motivate everyone towards growth. It’s an amazingly common attitude. Donald Trump claims he invented the “Think Big” phrase. New Zealand thinks their prime minister invented it. It’s the title of a really bad movie. So I don’t really know where it comes from, […]
Sales in and of itself can often feel confusing. “What can I do to get my foot in the door at this company that I know (based on my research) is a perfect fit for my business offerings when I don’t have any connections there? Why won’t she return my calls to discuss the proposal she requested? Why didn’t they buy when they gave me all the right signals? How could they have possibly selected our biggest competitor when clearly we are the best fit to meet their stated objectives/needs?” I’m sure most of these sound familiar. So rather than sit at your desk ho-hum and ruminate on these questions, recognize these challenges during the sales process as opportunities to INNOVATE.
We believe that this old adage is for the most part true, but not quite so simple. Really, what ever really is so simple? Actually, the more I thought about this saying, the more I realized that it fits quite nicely with what we teach to small businesses.