Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Welcome to Uncopyable women in Sales. If you're looking for actionable insights and real world tools to turbocharge your sales starting tomorrow, well, you're in the right place. Your host, Kay Miller, earned the affectionate nickname Muffler Mama when she sold more automotive mufflers than anyone else in the world. In this podcast, K will talk to another superstar women in sales as they reveal un copyable strategies you can use to rack up more leads, snag dream clients, and take your sales numbers through the roof. Stay tuned and get ready to make more sales. And how about this more money?
Speaker 2 (00:00:39) - My guest today is Barbara Weaver Smith, and Barbara is an author, consultant, and founder and CEO of The Whale Hunters. She helps leaders and teams of B2B companies in all industries who want to grow their business by landing bigger deals. Barbara, welcome to the podcast. I'm just delighted to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's my pleasure. And I would like to hear, first of all, before we get into the philosophy of the whale hunters and all that good stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:01:14) - Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, your eclectic background? It is eclectic. Sure. Well, I started out as an English professor. In a university of a college first and then a university, and then I became an academic dean at the university. And so I was I did that work for a long time. And then I left the university, mostly because there was no place else for me to go there. And I took a job as president of a statewide not for profit organization, and Indiana called the Indiana Humanities Council. And that was all about civic engagement and getting large groups of people together to figure things out for their community. So that's where I learned about big deals, is did a lot of big deals that the Humanities Council, that I had to raise all the money to support what we wanted to do. And then, also, I've had to, you know, raise money from individuals for the organization. So that was really like sales training. And I did that for four years, and I left there because there was the glass ceiling that I couldn't break through.
Speaker 2 (00:02:29) - And that's when I started my own business, which was in 1996. And it started out as a business doing kind of the same things I did at Lehigh Maladies Council. And over time, it evolved into a business of helping other businesses do gross, including sales then. And, about probably 2004, five I met Tom Searcy. That was my first business partner. He was the one that had the idea of Intuit whale hunters being allowed for sales. And so together we built that initial model of Scout hunt harvest whales, and we wrote a book about it in 2008, which is The Whale Hunting. And then I bought him out in 2009. So it's then mine and my husband's entirely since then. Well, that is quite an interesting journey. And your point about fundraising is definitely related to sales, because selling a vision, selling your cause, and getting money is definitely in the realm of sales. So you came up with this philosophy about whale hunting, and we talked just for a minute before we started recording that in the in Copyable philosophy, we call your ideal target market your moose.
Speaker 2 (00:03:53) - So interesting. Now we have another animal, whale, which are super cool. and at first I didn't know how to say that, but you helped me talk about the Inuit people right here, and. Yeah. And how they hunted whales centuries ago. So explain that and how you discovered that and and how you transfer that into your sales and sales training. I'll tell that. Interested in that? When he visited a museum, I think in Idaho, where they had artifacts from the Inuits. But when we started really learning about them, we discovered that, they, they spent all year preparing for a whale hunt. It only happened in April for a short period of time, just a few weeks, because the whales were migrating. And they go right past where these people lived, on the far northwest coast of Alaska. So they knew the whales were coming, but they didn't know exactly when. So all winter long they got ready. They were really good at teaching their young people about how their livelihood depended on the whales and relationship between the whales of them, which was a spiritual relationship to them.
Speaker 2 (00:05:04) - And then they had scouts that would go out and watch for the whales to come, and then they would watch the boat, which was called at a little, like a, like a big canoe. And it was made out of sealskin, just kind of, you know, you would think it would be a flimsy boat, but they sent eight men out in the boat. They didn't send the women out on the boat. They were doing other things, but they'd go out into the sea. And when they spotted a whale, the harpooneers job was to get right up close to the whale. Sometimes they had to get out of the boat and on the back of the whale to do that, and then they had to. Learn how to bring it in £100,000 of whale. And then it didn't die immediately. And so they had to bring an end ashore. And then everybody had to help to harvest it. They had. And whatever it was, scouts were watching to see where they would lay in, because they might not come back in exactly the same place.
Speaker 2 (00:06:04) - And so they had to have all their tools and all their men and all the all the people and the kids and everybody came to harvested. And so the kids learned how to harvest the blubber. And then as you got older, you harvestable things. The most interesting part of the story is they never touched the head when they were finished with all the body. The men who had brought it in took it back out the head, took it back out into the Bering Sea and dropped and allowed it to sink because they believed that the whales were reborn every year. And so I think that's what makes it a good analogy. Because at the end of his story, the whale is reborn. It's not dead. And so the whole system and process had and so consistent over long periods of time that scouting, planting and harvesting is where we got the model, which has worked really well the whole time. Well, we're getting quite the history lesson here and it is very interesting, very spiritual. And I was just briefly looking at the Inuit people and where they were.
Speaker 2 (00:07:15) - There are a lot of Inuit people, in different areas and tribes. Correct? Correct. Yeah. All over Iceland, all over the northern part of Canada. But you've broken this down into a process, which, of course, we'll talk about how that relates to sales. But a lot of their time was preparation. You know, they had to prepare. Right. And then and that's getting ready for the big event. And then when that event happens, they have a certain process in their rituals hunting, you know, for hunting. And and you know, I don't think that the whale had necessarily made the whale be reborn, but it's a cool concept. And that was actually their belief at the time. Well, who knows? We don't know everything. Maybe it happens, right? I don't know. So let's talk about then how you relate that. I mean, I think I'm getting hints of how that process relates to sales, you know, and so we've translated it into Scout Harvest.
Speaker 2 (00:08:22) - Scouting is all the things you do to identify targets. So we teach people this is all about Large-Scale sayings primarily. And so we teach the people in the company how to are. We start with the target filter where they define the characteristics of their eye out their ideal client estima, and then they research, but then in a database will come up with a list of actual companies that then they research each of those companies create a dossier, and then they kind of rank according to which one is the which ones are the most likely to be interested in. Well, and then they begin their outreach to those companies. So unlike sending a message out to market to see who comes in, they're deciding, we want you and you and you and you and you and making a list that way, which is very effective if you've done good targeting. Anything. It's systematic. So you always have a lead. So that's the scouting part. And you're and you're choosing to target, like you said, big clients. And when you have big clients you can afford to do your research, do your homework, find out where the companies are, the contact information, everything you need to know, which if you're selling, may be a small or low value product.
Speaker 2 (00:09:51) - It might not be as practical. But yeah, your focus is helping companies get bigger deals, right, which is a wonderful way to grow. If you have a product or service that a big company can use, then it's a good way to grow. It's a solid way to go without too big of an investment. And we do recommend that the salespeople are not the Scouts. The Scouts are marketing people or AD and people who like to research and do detail, which is not what salespeople like to do. Typically. So the all that work is done where the salespeople get involved with first, they communicate a lot because they keep learning more. As they start contacting the whale, they begin learning more. And that all feeds into the dossier, right? Well, you got that right. As a salesperson, I can attest to the fact that, you know, doing research and doing the details, finding out all that information is not my favorite part of the job. Landing the deals is the favorite part of the job.
Speaker 2 (00:10:54) - But but I'm also developing that relationship with the customer. So it sounds like with this method, the salesperson has an advantage because they know the customer. So from the get go, they can communicate more effectively. And yes. And we also recommend that they involve subject matter experts in the sale to the company. They're going to encounter anywhere from seven to a dozen influencers in the company. And if they can match up, they're key subject matter experts who are going to be delivering the service afterwards, or Opal or who have developed the product. Then they match up really well with the the, buying team. So the harpooner goes in first and meet someone, find someone who's willing to introduce him over to more people. And as that buyer is identified, they bring their subject matter experts to match up. So it's a completely different way of doing business. It's a team sale. It's company wide and requires that the company allow for subject matter experts to be involved when necessary. So you need agreement. We're all in this together.
Speaker 2 (00:12:14) - Everybody in the Wellington Village has a role and they're all important roles, not just the sales role, although they are responsible primarily for the hunt, but the the sales person then becomes like a conductor, you know, like an orchestrator for the moving parts, but that helps them compete with much larger competitors. As you move up market, not only do your customers get bigger, your competitors get more interested in you, and so you have to learn both things at the same time. And so a lot of big companies have a captured team, you know, they have sales engineers and they have people that write the bids. They have people that write the proposals. And smaller companies, midsize companies able to have all that. So how do you replicate that? The advantage that they have is the people that do the work, or the people that are talking to the buyers, and big companies don't have it. So it's a huge advantage when they learn to do it. Huge advantage. So so you really have to get buy in from every level.
Speaker 2 (00:13:22) - And so that's interesting. I know we've got a ton to cover, but I would like to know your sales process. So you're also doing the same thing right. You're looking for your whales right. The people that you can help the most who will get the most value, and also mean the most revenue. Yeah. So our. Our business isn't entirely whale hunting, but the part of it fits whale hunting. We target mid-size companies all be to be mostly, they're privately held. They're in all different kinds of industries. Lots of Taito industries, also technology and industries. A lot of work with marketing and, digital marketing companies, lots of technologies all over the map. We even had a company that dug trenches underneath highways and picked up, their name was Midwest Mole. Wow. Anyway, a good name now. So. So we do the same thing. put our criteria together, and then, go through a database to find a list of companies that, that need that. So we do that in the US.
Speaker 2 (00:14:31) - We're also doing in Australia, New Zealand and then. Great. So that's how we get our primary customers. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:14:40) - In. Today's podcast is sponsored by the acclaimed book Unstoppable Sales Secrets How to Create an Unfair Advantage and Outsell Your Competition, by Kay Miller. If you want to make more sales, you need to read this book. We'll even get you started with a free download of the first two chapters. Go to UN Copyable sales com slash chapters to grab this offer right now.
Speaker 2 (00:15:07) - Interesting that you say most of your customers are privately held, and no offense to any corporate people listening, but. Right, you know, privately held family businesses are easier to work with because they're not so many layers of red tape, and the people you're talking with can make a difference. But of course, it's every kind of company could benefit from this philosophy of finding the very best prospects and learning, learning, learning about them so that when you go in, when the sales person goes in, they're really prepared with the value proposition and why they are the best choice.
Speaker 2 (00:15:46) - And as you said, when you have bigger accounts then what we call you call the whales in un copyable, we call your ideal target your moose. And of course, you know, you, your moose is somebody else's moose. And the business that you have, somebody else wants. So it's very important to be really drilled into the customer and their needs. Now, I know that you are really involved in technology. You are thrilled with the technology that has come along and especially AI, and you're doing some interesting things with that. So I'd like to hear about how you are using it with your, you know, your institute and then also how salespeople can use AI. So let's start with. The Whale Hunters and the Whale Hunters Institute. And your clone. Yeah. Well, the the most interesting thing I've done with AI, and I am an early adopter, for sure. I'm I'm not a not I'm not an inventor, but I'm an early adopter. I like to get on board. So I discovered a company that allows you to build a clone.
Speaker 2 (00:16:58) - And what that involves is teaching the clone what you know. So my clone, Barbara, I it knows all my books. It knows all my materials. It knows a whole lot of what I know, but it has an instant memory and instant ability to pull things together. And so it's designed to be a coach, and you can interact with it either by typing or by just speaking like you were on ball. It's not a visual clone, it's just auditory that speaks in my voice. And it can answer any kind of question about whale hunting, which comes from my material. So we put it inside the Whale Hunters Institute, which has tons of courses and worksheets and other kinds of tools, video, audio, all kinds of learning opportunities about whale hunting. And then Barbara is there to answer questions and coach the along the way. So that's that's the point of it. And as far as selling goes, I think for company level, I think companies will do a lot of this to get all their materials uploaded and to this kind of a and they I service many of them are doing it for their website service at Q&A and things like that, although this is really deep.
Speaker 2 (00:18:19) - So for salespeople, all kinds of ways to use AI, you can use AI for using something like ChatGPT. You can use AI to help you research the prospects, keeping in mind that it's all completely up to date. It's not up to date right now, but it's up to date or a year or so ago. And, so that's one thing a lot of salespeople are using AI in messaging to create emails, voice messages, scripts, things like that. I have the advantage. Now I can go to Barbara AI and ask for things and get my old material back and did perform there. It's like a video script or something like that. So it's a lot of fun to do. If you don't have your call claw, you can do the same thing on ChatGPT and you can get outlines of things. You can get the structure of self help. You need to do a proposal. You can give it information about your business and what you need to do and ask it for a proposal. Then it will give you the structure that you need, even if you have to change some of the content.
Speaker 2 (00:19:30) - Very time saving for things like that. I also used a AI technology called slides Speak, which allows you to what they say, interrogate a document. So what I did, partly as I was building the institute, I was doing courses. I would upload the PowerPoint up the main content and I would ask it for. A summary, full summary, a 50 word summary. Then I would ask it for a list of the topics. Then I would ask it for a quiz and it would write a quiz. Would write May 6 or 8 with questions. Multiple choice questions with answers. So even the wrong answers were in there. And I would say about six of every eight questions that it reduced were usable for me. You could also do the same thing with the word document. Anything that you want to summarize, anything that you want to repurpose and different way or turn it into a little script that a salesperson can use for outgoing video to a prospect or a customer. So there are just infinite ways.
Speaker 2 (00:20:37) - I used a couple of services that create videos from text. So for example, I could put a blog post in there and turn to a video. So I have reused tutorial. Yeah, I mean those are some of the ways I use it now. A few of the ways, right. That was a lot of different ways. And I do think people are still intimidated by AI. And when we talk about these, you know, privately held businesses or family businesses, people are busy running their business, their company, and so they don't have a lot of time to investigate AI. But as you said, really it's it's user friendly. I have my videos like this one transcribed and that's there are so many different options to do that. And then put that into AI and say, what are the top ten tips and what are the top ten action steps? And of course, the thing with AI that you know and everybody talks about, you have to edit it. You can't just take what it creates class.
Speaker 2 (00:21:44) - And we I've used that to for, for art, for artwork. And that's pretty interesting because I did a presentation where I was talking about the fact that you need to make your customers feel like rockstars, and I was talking about a story where my husband and I went to Hawaii and we were in a kayak, and we asked AI to generate us looking like rock stars. I don't know, it took a few tries and the end result was super entertaining. but one thing I've noticed too, when you put things in AI for artwork. Anyway, the numbers and the letters are all mixed up, so I'm not sure what that is about, but I'm sure it will be fixed. but yeah, I've got my whole book that I put into AI to summarize it. So as you said, content repurposing content. I kind of laugh because, you know, companies like Grammarly, where it would check the grammar of your email and you being a former English teacher, you know all about that. And I'm also, picky about grammar.
Speaker 2 (00:22:43) - And so now you can use AI to do that and so much more. So yes, as a sales person, it is it is so valuable. So so let's talk about, you know, your new platform and membership, which is the Whale Hunters Institute. And I know you have some, giveaways, some, some ways to get acquainted with the platform. Yes. Well, as I said, we're Hunters Institute is an online learning platform about large account sales and has a huge amount of information and courses and things in there. We have a free trial available. It's a two week free trial. You can just go to the Whale hunters.com and it's very visible. How to get to the Institute and free trial. We blog for any of your sales people to try it out. And after the free trial it's $29 a month. Then it this includes the Clore, which is a coach and it's a lot of fun, so I hope people will try it out. Yeah, give it a try. That's super reasonable price too.
Speaker 2 (00:23:45) - I'm curious, do you have courses within the platform that talk about AI then and how to use AI? Well, developing that, it's not in there yet, but it will be in their working lot. I'm actually working on, a flip book about all of the AI that I used in putting the institute together, and that should be available in a couple of weeks. You know, things are changing and more options are becoming available so fast. it's just you got to keep up with all of this stuff that's going on. So for sure, you also said that you have a giveaway, a cheat sheet or something about how to stop scaring your buyers. So tell us a little bit more about that. Well, that's small companies, right? In large companies for a lot of reasons. they're they're small size. They're they're unknown. They don't think you have systems and processes like they do. So you have to overcome or mitigate these fears before they'll buy or advantage. You have a lot of advantages to losing flexibility, agility, speed.
Speaker 2 (00:24:51) - That they can't get with bigger customers. But the first thing is the individual buyers. They're afraid of making a mistake, afraid of more work that created the internal conflict. So we have this, begets culture by top ways to stop scaring your whales. And it's available. You'll see it right in the early stages of the whale. And so we have resources in industry. Yeah. And of course, for buyers, sometimes the status quo is the least scary. It's, you know, no decision is a decision. So it really does make sense to strengthen your arsenal to, to help the bigger companies realize the advantages that a smaller company can provide, which definitely are many. So. So when you when you determine the fears that we have a system to help you develop fear busters, which are tangible things you can use in your sales process. Now, can you happen to give us an example of what 1 or 2 of those might be? A fear buster. Sure. Now, suppose they're worried that you're not going to send your A-Team, that you're going to send people to do the work that they don't appreciate? So a fear buster would be your your plan for putting the people on this job or your list, ideally, your list of people who are going to do the business with them, you know, serve them.
Speaker 2 (00:26:21) - Another example would be, if they if they don't recognize the town where you're from, if they think you're kind of backwater, then get a mailing address in your nearest city and use that instead. Just the little things. create an onboarding process. A lot of things go wrong when you bring a new company on board, because there's so many new people involved on both sides. You need a really detailed, specific plan of who's going to do what, how that works. Then turn that into a process chart and share in the sales process so that they know you have a process that they can count on because they have processes for everything that. So as a small company, start thinking about all the processes that you do that aren't written down. The start writing them down step by step, give them a name and a trademark, and then you have something to offer that nobody else has because you trademarked your they. Well in the onboarding is is important. And I'm glad you brought that up because as salespeople and a lot of sales trainers, it's all about finding that moose or finding that whale doing the preparation and giving them your value proposition and convincing them, persuading them that you are the best option.
Speaker 2 (00:27:45) - But in you know, unless you're a one and done sales person, like you're going door to door selling solar or something. Almost all salespeople that we deal with are relationship sellers. So it's a really good point to talk about the fact that once the sales made, that is not the end, and that's the beginning. And that's where the real power of sales numbers come from, you know, being very strategic in not only getting new customers, but keeping those old customers happy and new business with those current customers, which doesn't happen if they have a bad onboarding experience. Right and how much it cost to get a new customer rather than keeping a customer. So the onboarding and then what happens after that is critical to your success long term. Okay. So you've given us some great tips in this 30 minutes. And I wanted to know if you have any closing advice, anything that someone can do right away. a sales person or a sales leader that's listening. What would be the first step you would recommend? I would say they don't have any kind of system, really, for learning about a prospect before they go in to do a little bit of research, either do some AI research or find whatever you can find on the internet about that customer so that when you go in the door, the questions you ask are intelligent questions that equip answer online.
Speaker 2 (00:29:21) - So then you get better answers by the people you're talking to, and you learn more quickly about what they do. So you need to prepare yourself as well as you possibly can before you go and do more when nothing. That's that's a very good recommendation. And of course, it shows the buyer that you've done homework, that you are invested in this relationship. you know, if you go in and just ask, you know, really dumb questions that you could have found on their website, that's not going to impress them for sure. So. Well, those are great tips. I want to tell the listener that you can find Barbara and her clone at the Whale hunters.com. So it's the Whale hunters.com, and Barbara is actually Barbara Weaver Smith just like it sound. And that's where you can find her on LinkedIn. And when you check out the Whale hunters.com, you can look at the the Institute and give it a try. I recommend that. So, Barbara, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:30:28) - I thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed chatting with you, and I encourage your readers and your listeners if they have any questions or interested at all in whale hunting, just drop me an email. I will definitely respond. So I assume that's Barbara at the Whale hunters.com, correct? Yeah. Okay. Got it. Well thank you once again. Thank you Terry.
Speaker 1 (00:30:53) - Thanks for listening to this episode of Uncopyable Women in Sales, your source for secrets you can use to make more sales. Check the show notes for links and contact information, and if you enjoyed the podcast, please spread the word by subscribing, sharing and leaving a five star review. You can always learn more by going to Unstoppable Sales Company cast. Until next time, go out and supercharge your sales like a true unconquerable rockstar.