Today I’m starting a blog series on The Whale Hunters Process. It’s a how-to process for landing big sales with customers that are much bigger than you! It consists of three stages—scout, hunt, and harvest—and nine phases, illustrated below.
Derived from the story of how the Inuit people hunted whales, this process has several key characteristics:
- It is a strategic business development methodology for explosive growth.
- It meets the needs of entrepreneurs and small business owners and executives who want to have fewer, larger sales to increasingly larger customers.
- It assumes that you have a complex sale, not a simple transaction. You are selling a service, a system, or a combination of products and support, training, or consulting.
- It includes subject matter experts as part of the sales team.
- It assumes that the sales process is not complete until the contract has been fulfilled.
- It provides everyone in your company with a defined role in selling and delivering your products and services.
So actually it embeds a sales process within a larger, more comprehensive process that is preceded by detailed research and is followed by increasingly effective service delivered to the customer.
As we implement this process with our customers, we pay close attention to hand-offs–all those places in the process when one team concludes its work and a new team takes over. How does the harpooner (sales person) hand off to the operations team? How will operations interact with training and service? At every step, we are designing written guidelines (maps) to ensure superior service.
In upcoming posts I’ll illustrate each of the process steps, link to some free tools, and include interviews with some whale hunters who are growing their businesses in this way!
Are you a whale hunter? I’d love to hear from you. What steps in your sales process does your team handle best? Tell us how. Is there a step at which you get stuck? Ask for advice from other whale hunters. Post your comments here.
Learn more at www.thewhalehunters.com
