Whale Hunting debuted as a business development model for small and midsize B2B companies in 2006. I co-authored the definitive guide in 2008 with Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company and expanded the scope in 2017 with Whale Hunting with Global Accounts: Four Critical Sales Strategies to Win Global Customers…....
This article summarizes the philosophy and key tenets of the whale hunting metaphor for large account selling. It distinguishes how Whale Hunting differs from other methods of selling and growing large customers.
Michael Miller, account representative with Pearson Digital Learning, had a sales territory consisting of exactly 25 customers, no more. Michael had n0 opportunity to acquire a larger territory or to locate new prospects within his territory. His customers were school districts in Arizona, and his product/service was educational software. He did not have ALL […]
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If you have what Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan calls a “Unique Process,” you are way ahead of your competition in differentiation. Your brand promise IS that you will deliver the outcomes that your process inevitably produces. The illustration to your left is a replica of The Whale Hunters Process™. It consists of three stages–Scout, Hunt, and […]
A new report from CSO Insights is their This research study–19th in CSO’s series–looked at more than 100 metrics and garnered responses from 1200 companies. Essentially, this piece is a summary of the study, with more detailed information on various metrics available through CSO Insights–industry specific responses, for example. What always strikes me about the […]
I did an EDGY Perspectives teleconference on this topic, which is essentially an overview of some of the key principles of Whale Hunting. There's also a discussion of how the RFP process fits into your overall whale hunting process. Here's a link to the audio recording. And my thanks to Dan Waldschmidt for featuring me! I am […]
I had a very happy phone call today–the kind that pleases me more than all others. One of my clients called to report that on the previous night, the school board of his customer (a 50,000 student school district) had unanimously approved a five-year, $6.3 million contract for educational software that my client’s company sells. […]
Perhaps you know that one of The Whale Hunters key principles is that sales is 90% process and 10% magic, not the other way around. It is true. To help turn that concept into a real tool you can use, here are three steps to a more efficient sales process.
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.
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.