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

Epilogue

Let the Hunt Begin

WE ARE NOT MARINE BIOLOGISTS or anthropologists studying Inuit culture. We could not live more different lives. We advise the executive leadership team in fast-growth companies on how they can increase revenues and streamline their client list. Just like the Inuit, when your business reaches a certain stage of growth, you face a hard choice. You can make more and more small, safe sales, perhaps increasing the cost per sale, and certainly reducing the predictability of your sales and revenue cycle. Or you can concentrate on a smaller number of much bigger accounts, accounts that are harder to find, harder to land, and riskier to close and to deliver, but that will reduce your cost per sale, increase the predictability of your sales and revenue, and transform your company.

In these chapters, we have presented a system that will allow your fast-growth business to tolerate these risks, and we have encouraged you to implement this system, because the rewards of concentrating efforts on those big accounts outweigh the perceived safety offered by making many small sales. In business, as in the Arctic, it pays to become a whale hunter.

Consider your choices. Fewer than 1.5 percent of all companies in the United States ever grow above $25M in annual sales. That means that 98.5 percent of the companies never break through the glass ceiling of being a “small company.” Business as usual—more of the same—will not allow you to make the rare transformation from “small ...