I am so pleased to introduce our newest blogger, Lindsay Bayuk, who is the Sales and Marketing Manager for The Whale Hunters. You can also find Lindsay in her natural habitat at LinkedIn. She’ll be focused on the “young entrepreneurs” in whale hunting. A 2009 grad of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Lindsay proves every day that Gen-Y people can think and invent and work and compute with the best of any generation who came before, and perhaps better than most. Her inaugural post follows:
Born between 1982 and 1995, Generation Y were born to scout. Not only does this generation represent the young, up-and-comers in the workforce, but living through the internet boom has cultivated among us an invaluable skill set—scouting.
As you know in whale hunting, the scouts are the young boys (age 9-12) who are sent out to look for signs that the whales are coming. They are trained to look for the proper signs well in advance of the whales—birds overhead, schools of fish, the shape of waves.
This same search skill set is engrained in many of my Gen Y friends and co-workers. We are all masters of search. We can research people, find data, and tools like it’s nobody’s business. But for Presidents and CEOs however, it IS your business!
Proper scouting is a key first step to whale hunting. Scouts must recognize the proper signs before the village prepares and launches the boat to hunt. In the literal sense, the scouts research each of the whale companies that your village has targeted to hunt. It’s a critical role!
Scouting is something that Gen Y does for fun and naturally gravitates towards at work. I know I had my first email address in the 5th Grade. In 2000, when we were teenagers, Google hit its 1 billion page search index. In 2004, as many of us were completing high school or college, Facebook hit 1 million members. Gen Y may not represent the majority demographic on Linkedin, but we could easily try it out, learn it, and leverage it as a tremendous scouting tool.
One of the reasons we’re fearless about technology is because we know there’s nothing to break. There’s nothing we can’t erase. We’re willing to test the best tools or sites on the web. The really good ones are intuitive. If we can’t get it quickly, we move on. And if we don’t know the answer to something we’ll “Google it.” Everything we need is at our fingertips.
The young adults in the Inuit village were trained to scout. The good news for busy small business owners—you don’t need to become web and social media experts. Gen Y has already lived it! So, teach your scouts the research you need, send them out, and trust they have the skills to recognize the whale signs.
P.S. Learn more about Scouting and the other phases of Whale Hunting through our collection of sales articles and sales resources. Just click here.
