Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company

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3 Sentence Summary

Whale Hunting will teach you the strategy and tactics needed to find, target, and land whale-sized customers for your business. It’s a how-to sales guide filled with examples and resources for growing your business faster and smarter. Short on theory and long on practical details, this book outlines a 9-step sales process that has the potential to help carry your company to the next level.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Learning how to land big clients is the fastest way to grow your business.
2. You land whale-sized clients by addressing their fears.
3. Whale hunting is difficult and expensive. Success depends on a targeted sales strategy that requires knowing exactly who you are, what you have to offer, and who your ideal customer is.
4. Processes are very important to build early on, otherwise the growth will not be sustainable.
5. Reduce fears by focusing on process, communication, and meeting clear expectations.

Whale Hunting Summary

Signs of the Times

• You have to prove to them that you and your team can deliver a product or service that will improve their ability to do what they do best, without making any waves or causing any problems. They want improvement disguised in the cloak of “business as usual.”
• So why are so many small companies unsuccessful in entering this larger arena? Because they do not fully understand the fears of whale-sized companies.
• Fear trumps pain every time. If you can’t understand and resolve the wale’s fear, you will not be able to make the sale.

Know the Whale

• Capturing a big one requires a clear and concise brand promise.
• Avoid promises that fail to differentiate your brand from any of thousands of other brands, products, and services
• Your brand promise must have a unique competitive advantage, that one thing that sets you apart from the competitors.
• Before you attempt to know your whales, first you have to know yourself
• What do you want buyers to see when they have an image of your company? Then go out there and see if what you wish to be true is true.
• Identifying your whale begins with an effort to understand what you actually sell. What makes you different from the others in your marketplace? Why have you been successful, while others in your industry have not? Why have you been unsuccessful in some areas where your competitors have found success?
• Use the “five why’s” to get beyond glib or superficial answers to the root cause
• Whale hunting promises fast growth. If you want to grow faster than you have grown, if you want to grow faster than your competitors are growing, whale hunting offers a unique advantage.
• Whale hunting is the only way to grow your business aggressively above the market rate.
• Use a target filter to identify your ideal buyer.

Clarify the Brand Promise

1. Understand your ocean: Define your competitive environment. Know what standards all competitors know and claim to meet and exceed.
2. Define superior benefits: Identify those standard benefits at which you are clearly superior to competitors.
3. Define unique benefits: Identify those true differentiating characteristics that make your product and/or service offerings unique

Three Levels to the Wealth Pyramid

1. Small accounts. Low risk, low return. Marketing tactics are used to bring people to you. Stuff that you put out there and hope that the phone will ring
2. Mid-sized accounts. Medium risk with a medium return on investment. These are acquired through direct sales efforts or through a sales channel. You’re deliberately selling to them.
3. Wales sized accounts. Hunted by the executive management team. High risk, high reward. Must be very strategic with who you target.

Send Out the Scouts

• Before you apply your target filter to the entire marketplace, run a calibration exercise using your current customers. Does your target filter identify your current best customers?
• Create a list of companies, somewhere between 25 and 100, that meet your target criteria
• The next up in the scouting process is to develop a basic report, or dossier, on each company in your whale chart
• A lot of information can be found online for public companies. Private companies will require more work such as calling them directly and asking for information.
• Search for information about senior executives and board members. Learn who they are, what they respect, and what ambitions they hold for their company. Most important, look for connections between your company and your whale target.

Set the Harpoon

• Your first visit does not involve making a sale. Rather, your mission is to learn whether pursuing this particular whale is a good idea for your company.
• Beware of little nibbles with big promises. If a whale-size opportunity is real, there should be an adoption schedule with volume commitments based on performance standards for your firm to meet. If you hear, “We’ll see how it goes,” it is a sucker punch. If they have no plan, you have no path. No path means no commitment.

Be Mindful of How You Present Yourself

1. Image: is your website pertinent and professional?
2. Voice: have you prepared every receptionist to handle and route calls from your prospect?
3. Knowledge: does every member of your team demonstrates a deep knowledge of the prospect’s business?
4. Quality: is your proposal or statement of work correct, attentive to detail, attractive, and stylistically appropriate?
5. Depth: are you engaging your subject matter experts in specific ways to support the sales process?
6. Commitment: can your prospect observe a commitment to excellent delivery in all interactions with your company?
7. Enthusiasm: does your entire “village” express a desire to serve this customer?
8. Respect: can you ensure that all of your company’s deliverables to this prospect are completed on time?
9. Courtesy: will everyone on your team go the extra mile in arranging for site visits, conference calls, team meetings, and other events?
10. Sincerity: Will your prospect feel a sincere desire for their business from every encounter with your team members?

Characteristics of Great Questions

• Behavioral: what do you do when a project gets off track?
• Historical: how did this process work last time?
• Specific: who are the people that need to be involved?
• Narrative: tell us about a great experience with a vendor?
• Comparative: how do you want your next experience to be different?
• Vulnerable: give us an example of a project that you did not manage well.
• Predictive: what happens when we meet at the first three benchmarks?

Ride the Whale

• The better you become at understanding the buyers, the more successful you will hunt.
• If you can overcome the whale’s fear, you can win the deal with your advantages. But all the advantages on earth will not help if you do not have a system for overcoming the whale’s fear.
• The nature of the whale is to seek safety over benefits.

2 Types of Buyers

1. Financial buyers: person who has the ultimate authority to commit the whale’s money to do business with you; the one who can say yes.
2. Specialized buyers: people from a variety of departments that may be affected by the decision to purchase from you. None of these buyers can say yes to a deal but any of them can say no.

Why Big Companies Like to do Business with Other Big Companies

• Reputation
• Stability
• Prestige
• Speak the same language
• Similar systems and processes
• No one gets blamed for the decision

Why Big Companies Like to do Business with Small Companies?

• Control
• Agility and flexibility
• Possibly price
• Attention from the top
• Innovation
• Concessions

What Whales Fear

• Change
• Conflict
• Additional work
• Failure and mistakes

How to Counter Fear

• Get everyone to the buyer’s table. You cannot educate or calm people with whom you are not connected.
• Devote 90:10 effort to a 50:50 commitment. Make it clear that if the whale does their part to commit that you will take more than your fair share of implementation responsibility.
  • Reinforce the status quo. Make sure they know what systems will not change as a consequence of making a deal with you.
  • Propose specific steps in the comprehensive plan.
  • Show the strength of your people, your resources, and your time commitments
• Don’t pretend that there will not be problems. Demonstrate how your company will work through problems and resolve issues
• Use illustrations. Show people what implementation will look like.
• Plan the experience before you meet. Don’t have your entire team set across the table from theirs. Determine who you want to sit next to whom, and then make certain that the meeting table set that way

Capture the Whale

• Map your sales process documenting every step that has gone into successful sales of past deals
• Depending on the major of your business, these steps might include:
  1. Qualify the prospect
  2. Develop a product prototype
  3. Get to prospect approval of the scope of the project
  4. Agree on a contract
  5. Arrange terms
• Brevity equals clarity and simplicity of understanding

Sew the Mouth Shut

• Stay in close communication. Many buyers will expect you to forget about them after agreements are signed. Take this opportunity to prove them wrong
• Find a way to get some money to change hands early. Paying that first invoice changes the relationship – whereas you used to be a sales organization, now you are a vendor or supplier
• The longer the time between closing the deal and delivering what you promise, the more vulnerable you become
• Share the activity your team is doing leading up to the delivery

After Deal Spoilers

1. The provider you believe you have replaced. Once they learn of their loss they will begin an all out effort to regain any portion of the business
2. Someone at or near the buyer’s table who was insufficiently convinced during the sales process
3. All of your competitors in the marketplace who are ready to step in at any moment that you leave an opening

Beach the Whale

• You need to prepare your team to deal with the culture change of hunting big clients
• You need to make sure that they have enough bandwidth to continue to do their work while also making the whale their priority
• Speed and collaboration go hand in hand
• Processes are important to build early on. Otherwise, without the best people in the best positions to leverage their abilities, sustaining growth is very difficult.

10 Practices to Move Forward Fast

1. Define the purpose. Collaboration is about getting the right information to the right people at the right time to make decisive judgments based on the collective knowledge
2. Keep moving. Keep up the schedule regardless of who cannot attend
3. Use an online communication space
4. Be here now. Show up on time. Be prepared. Give your full attention.
5. Meet only to do work. Meetings are not for reporting, presenting, or sharing. They are only for reaching decisions.
6. Focus on the future. Don’t rehash the past.
7. Build and test models. Models allow you to test ideas, processes, and practices before you implement.
8. Communicate frugally. Don’t glut the system with excessive minutes and meeting notes and no one will read.
9. Embrace progress, not perfection. Take one step ahead today; take another step ahead next week. You don’t need to do it all at once.
10. There is no “they.” Assume “they” means “you.”

Honor the Whale

• If you continue to meet and exceed your promises at increasingly high levels of sales, you are on the road to rapid, sustainable growth
• Entrepreneurial companies need to build on their successes by establishing replicable processes that can be used again and again to land and service significant customer accounts
• The fast growth company integrates the best of an entrepreneurial spirit with the desire to implement reliable processes that are continually reviewed and approved.
• Leaders and employees understand how to balance quick reaction time with a sense of overall control that reduces panic and builds confidence
• Make promises and keep them
• Reduce fear by demonstrating consistency and process control
• Focus on process, communication, and clear expectations

Celebrate the Whale

• Take time to review lessons learned
• Have candid conversations about how well your teams performed and what will be the focus for improvement
• Keep the whale informed of your increased capabilities and scope

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