The Whale Hunters

Who We Are

The Whale Hunters is a sales strategy coaching company that helps small businesses grow fast bymaking bigger sales to bigger customers.

Based on a proven sales and business development process, a national network of managing partners provides local chapters to coach business owners and executives, an online community, workshops, and consulting services.

Since 2004, hundreds of businesses in North America have benefited from The Whale Hunters process with the help of the company and its partners.

Company founder and president Dr. Barbara Weaver Smith is a nationally known authority on business development and the RFP process and co-author of Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company. Using the traditional Inuit whale hunt as a metaphor for big sales, The Whale Hunters provides a clear nine-phase model for successfully finding, landing, and harvesting whale-sized accounts.

Founded in 2004, the company is headquartered in Phoenix, AZ, with a midwest office in Indianapolis, IN.

Our Beliefs

Several core beliefs about buiness growth inform our practice.

Sales is 90% process and less than 10% magic: Magic is unpredictable, hard to scale, and expensive. The Whale Hunters Process™ builds an intrinsic asset into your company that can be taught, improved, scaled, and replicated.
Focus on the hunt, not the hunter: The Whale Hunters Process™ creates fast-growth sales and business management processes within your company, focused on hunting and handling accounts 10 to 20 times the size of your average account. Rather than treating the individual salespersons as magicians, we integrate the sales process into your company. This requires a defined strategy with clear steps and responsibilities, teamwork, and a clear understanding of the premise that the village survives because it hunts.
Sustained change requires sustained energy: Chances are you are proud of the company culture that you’ve built. But is it truly a fast-growth culture? Does everyone want to grow and understand their role in rapid growth? You can define and build the growth culture that you want, but you may not be able to do it alone. It takes outside energy to facilitate the transition and even more energy to sustain the change. By translating good process design into good habits and eventually into good instincts, The Whale Hunters provide the necessary energy to create and sustain a permanent cultural change.

The Whale Hunters Story

Come with us to a place that is much darker, much colder, and much more dangerous than wherever you are right now. We are among the indigenous Inuit people in the far Northwest, along the coast of Alaska, centuries ago. Like all the other families of our village, we live along the coast in oil lamp-lit, earthen huts. Spring’s warmth has yet to thaw the frigid air. And everyone, in every hut, is doing what we are doing: waiting for the whales’ return. Although we know the whales come back each spring, we don’t know exactly when. So we send out scouts, who spot the signs before their arrival.

One morning a boy runs into the village, electrifying us with the news: “I have whale sign.” As harpooner, you rally your shaman and six oarsmen and prepare to launch your boat. Called an “umiak” (OOM-yock), the boat is sacred, scrubbed clean and pure, to honor the tradition of our ancestors.

The hunt will take weeks out on the open, icy water; and there is much work to do, so everyone plays a part. The shaman provides spiritual direction while the oarsmen row. As harpooner, you direct the umiak to the whale and, at the precise moment, place the harpoon in exactly the right spot on the whale. And then, if you are very skillful, the whale will pull towards the coastline and run along the coast for days until it tires. But if you are not, you risk your own icy death… and starvation back in the village.

Eventually the whale grows tired. But before we can bring it ashore, we must keep the whale afloat. So one crew member must jump into the frigid waters and sew the whale’s mouth shut. Only then can we work with the forces of nature to the steer the whale and beach it. Timing is crucial: left in the open air for too long, the whale will begin to rot. So we must harvest it quickly.

Everyone works to harvest the whale – oil, blubber, skin, meat, and bone – all but the head which we take back out to sea, in gratitude to the gods, where it will sink and be reborn. After the leaders distribute the harvest, we return to our village for a great celebration. But we do not celebrate the great hunters, the boat, or even the harpooner. We celebrate the whale that gives us life and the opportunity to thrive.

Indeed the Inuits’ whale hunt is fraught with much danger and difficulty. Century upon century, people have been killed hunting whales in this way. But when we hunt walrus, caribou, seals, or a string of fish, we can eat only for a day or a week or two. On the other hand… one whale feeds our village for an entire year.