How many of you have worked for leaders that implement culture based on the last book they have read? If you are lucky, you may get to experience six different cultures during any fiscal year!
Fortunately, The Whale Hunters Process™, when implemented by a leader and his or her team can alleviate this experience for your workforce! How? In my experience, implementing The Whale Hunters Process™ has helped our team build, be clear and save time.
This week’s newsletter is about the excuses that we have for not taking action today on a strategy that we believe in. No time, not enough money, wrong people, team is not on board yet, etc. etc. The conversation goes like this: “As soon as I fix ‘X’, I can move forward. If you have a […]
Today’s Guest Blogger is Joseph Olewitz . Joseph has been there & done that in the area of new business development. In addition to being CEO and Principal Consultant at 22nd Story Strategies, Inc., Joseph currently shares experiences deriving from years of pitching large professional services deals on his Intentional Growth blog. As I […]
Making a commitment to hunt whales is the beginning of a dramatic cultural shift. It’s more than just a new business development strategy. Embarking on this process successfully requires vision, planning, implementation and personal development from everyone involved, particularly the CEO.
When I started out in my own business fifteen years ago, I thought that business networking was the way to acquire leads, opportunities, and referrals—in short, the best sales strategy I could pursue. So I networked at Chamber of Commerce events and business roundtable events and women in business events and small business events and […]
I’ve talked to so many company leaders and sales execs lately who are facing the same problem: before the recession, they acquired all of their new business through referrals. But ever since the economy weakened, the referral “pipeline” has dried up. They are frankly terrified because they have no processes in place to develop new business. This phenomenon […]
Are sales professionals trying to sell out of fear instead of quality? It seems they sell to “stay alive” just because they want to keep their jobs. More than ever, this is when we need to be sure everyone is on the boat! Sales team members can’t be expected to sell alone. If we expect sales professionals to land bigger deals, then we need to send them out with the tools to be successful, and the most powerful one, is a full boat!
Unlike the majority of the sale optimization posts out there, we’d recommend not focusing on lead management, some sort of funnel, or your web traffic. That’s not whale hunting. Instead, focus on mapping a process to go after bigger customers. Once you have exact steps and players at each step defined, go about making incremental improvements to what’s working. As Scott said in his article, you should focus more on what’s working than on what’s not working. A truly great sales process will come from continual improvement of what’s working… not just fixing what’s broken.
To manage the handoff between sales and delivery, you may want to start with a checklist. The checklist is the next step up from a to-do list because it creates organizational process. That’s one of the reasons that The Whale Hunters Process™ works—we help companies build the bridge between what’s sold and delivered through process. Communication is great and can always be improved. Process on the other hand can be standardized, written down, charted out, and taught without the risk of mis-interpretation
In a recent article on Entrepreneur.com, Tom Black gave this piece of advice: Understand the sales process. A sale happens, he says, when there’s a transfer of feeling and when you bring people to a point of decision. Of course, we’re all about sales process, but sometimes, even when you’ve done everything right you get […]
This article is a discussion of sales management and small business growth, focused on five reasons why CEOs fear and do not understand their sales teams.