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

Tom Searcy (Author), Barbara Weaver Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

For thousands of years, the Inuit people of thefrozen North have risked life and limb to hunt thebiggest game on earth—the mighty whale. They endure treacherous seas, frigid temperatures, and deadly ice floes for days at a time in order to catch these elusive and massive mammals. Why risk so much when they could have fish and caribou so much more easily?Because a single whale can provide a village with food and oil to last an entire year.

Would you hunt small game day-in and day-out, when you could hunt the biggest prize of them all every year?

It's the same in the sales business; small fish will keep you fed, but landing each whale-size account can fill your corporate belly for years. Hunting the biggest, most profitable deals is no easy task, and if your targetescapes, you'll lose time and resources. But the payoff is almost always worth your risk and effort.

Whale Hunting provides a clear, step-based model for successfully finding, landing, and harvesting whale-size accounts—the kinds of accounts that transform your business. For small and mid-market companies especially, whale hunting can mean the differencebetween merely surviving and thriving spectacularly. But you have to be smart, and you have to be prepared. This revolutionary, one-of-a-kind sales guide will show you how to:

• Scout your best prospects, learn all you can about them, and get their attention

• Hunt your whale using a cross-functional team ofexperts throughout the process of selling and closing the deal

• Harvest new accounts by delivering superior service and setting the stage for future long-term business

Whale Hunting isn't a theoretical or experimental take on sales, but a proven, practical system that has earned $2 billion in new sales for the authors and their clients. The secret to success in today's fast-moving corporate environment is to find and land the biggest creatures in the sea. Why spend all your time reeling in smallaccounts, when you could land big accounts regularly and predictably?

From the Back Cover

Praise for Whale Hunting

"Whale Hunting is required reading for anyone who is going after the big fish in a market. Engaging, practical, and well organized, it is simply the best book on major account selling out there. Someone once said that confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and bringing the mayonnaise. Whale Hunting gives you the tools to pursue big deals with that kind of confidence."
—Keith R. McFarland, author of The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers

"I meet with the leaders of thousands of entrepreneurial companies every year from around the world. Every one of them is looking for ways to grow faster, smarter. The straightforward Whale Hunting system gives companies a road map for landing the elusive anchor accounts—the big accounts that let them get to the next level of people, services, and revenue. Searcy and Smith have put the key principles together to learn how, with the power of the remarkable story of the Inuit whale hunt. This is an entrepreneur's must-read!"
—Dr. Tom Hill, coauthor of the bestselling Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470182695
• ISBN-13: 978-0470182697
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #51,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Whale Hunting--A true process for landing large clients, January 21, 2008

By 

Paul Diamond "Pablo" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company (Hardcover)

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 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Than a Book about Landing Big Sales, April 22, 2008

By 

Richard T. Vacca - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company (Hardcover)

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 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compass for answering an RFP, November 21, 2009

By 

Alexandra C. Gibson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company (Hardcover)

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.