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

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

(16 customer reviews)

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NU-ING-00029048

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Using the ancient Inuit whale hunt as a metaphor for big sales, Whale Hunting gives you a clear nine-phase model for successfully finding, landing, and harvesting whale-sized sales accounts—the kind of sales that transform your business. Here, you’ll learn how to turn the dangerous endeavor of selling to large companies and big contracts into a strategy for continued success and growth. Stop wasting time with little accounts and start landing monster accounts.

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Product Details

Author:	Tom Searcy
Hardcover:	288 pages
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication Date:	January 02, 2008
Language:	English
ISBN:	0470182695
Product Width:	159.0 centimeters
Product Height:	228.5 centimeters
Product Weight:	1.03 pounds
Package Length:	9.0 inches
Package Width:	6.2 inches
Package Height:	1.2 inches
Package Weight:	1.0 pounds
Average Customer Rating:	based on 16 reviews

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review: 5.0

( 16 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 found the following review helpful:

Whale Hunting--A true process for landing large clients Jan 21, 2008 By Paul Diamond "Pablo"
First the cons...
I don't like the title, Whale Hunting. The book has this title because the authors translate the hunting methods of the Inuit people of northwest Alaska into methods and systems for gaining large client sales. What do whale hunting and business growth have in common? A precise and successful methodology, as it turns out. However, as a surfer and general admirer of dolphins and whales, I find all the whale hunting analogies to be overwhelming for my easily disturbed psyche. That said, no whales die in the book.

The Pros...
Well written, clear, concise, exceptional methods, strong actionable advice. This book really walks you through the process of selling to large clients, and there is more to it, than you might initially think.

The Review...
In Whale Hunting: How To Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company, authors Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith explain the nine phases that the Inuit people of northwest Alaska use to scout, hunt, and harvest their whales. The authors translate the Inuit methodology into processes and apply them to the business practice of landing large clients.

The book offers specific, actionable steps when it comes to making big sales. And it shows how to engage a cross-functional team of subject-matter experts throughout the process of selling and closing the deal. Once a company learns the process, it is easily repeatable from client to client. These are the basic steps:

* Pre-Scouting - Analyze your capabilities, and the field of available clients
* Scouting - How to target your best prospects, research them, and get their attention
* Planning - Plan your contacts, message and questions
* Hunting - Analyze the buyer's team and mitigate their fear
* Capture - Selectively discover information from and disclose a controlled message to your client.
* The Big Show--A step-by-step guide for meeting with the buyer's team
* Servicing - How to service the large client with capacity and velocity
* Understand the process - Refine your internal operations and systems so that they can handle more large accounts.

While these specific steps are presented clearly in easy-to-understand terms, implementing them requires an exceptional amount of work, time and the right people. But, the authors contend, the pay-off in landing a major account (one that is 10 to 20 times the size of an average account) is worth the effort.

6 of 6 found the following review helpful:

More Than a Book about Landing Big Sales Apr 22, 2008 By Richard T. Vacca
As a professional educator most of my adult life and a president of a small business, the title of this timely and well-written book caught my attention immediately. The "whale hunting" metaphor aroused my curiosity and got me into the first chapter. The people-oriented concepts put forth by the authors --and the blueprint they provide for big sales success-- sustained my interest in the practical, often profound, ideas I encountered throughout the remainder of the book. I couldn't put this remarkable book down or refrain from writing marginal notes on almost every page. However, this is more than a book about landing big sales. It's a book about the power of collaboration, teamwork, and developing an "all for one, one for all" company attitude. Kudos to Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith for landing "the big one" in the world of popular business books!

Richard T. Vacca, Profesor Emeritus and President,
Vacca Authors and Consultants, Inc.

5 of 7 found the following review helpful:

Compass for answering an RFP Nov 22, 2009 By Alexandra C. Gibson
I read this book first from cover to cover and enjoyed the analogy.

It was not until our company really had to answer an RFP that this book showed its true merit. We used this book and Searcy's new book, RFPs Suck, almost exclusively to create a winning proposal. We not only beat out an incumbent but won the job without being the lowest price by showing how we would save the requesting company time and money.

As a small business, I always thought that our unique selling proposition was our nimbleness, our creativity, and our innovation. While these characteristics continue to be important to us internally and to other smaller clients, we learned through Whale Hunting that this is not what lands big companies.

I read the book, I used the teachings of the book, and we got the whale that we had never landed. Five stars obviously.

A clear strategy for landing those big customers! Aug 01, 2008 By A. Murtlow
Kudos to Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith for this unique and high value business strategy for successfully landing transformational accounts. Having been on both the sales side of a small entrepreneurial company (a whale hunter) and the chief executive of a corporation with revenues in excess of $1B (a whale), I can relate to both the challenges that face small companies when they attempt to land and serve a very large customer and the complicated and complex processes and barriers that exist in large companies. Whale Hunting provides a clear, concise strategy for success in this area and, perhaps most notably, provides the tools necessary to implement immediately. A must read for prospective whale hunters and whales alike!

This is the real deal Jan 21, 2008 By Joshua Hornick "Executive Coaching for Attorneys"
It's not easy for little companies to land deals with big companies. It requires an understanding of how and why the big companies buy. It requires that the small company develop processes that meet the psychological and relational needs of the big company as well as having a competitive product or service. This book explains in very clear language what a small company needs to do. As I said before, it's not a simple thing--to hunt whales, but if a small company wants to grow, I know of no better strategy, and I know of no better guide to the process.

See all 16 customer reviews on Amazon.com