Do you
ever feel like a minnow in a sea of whales?
How do
you break the minnow mindset?
When my son
Brad was in kindergarten, his teacher left the room briefly one afternoon.
While she was gone, a couple of sixth graders stopped into the kindergarten
room and teased the children. Brad came home in tears.
"I'm
never going to sixth grade!" he cried.
"Why
not?" I asked him.
"Because
they're so big!"
Brad suddenly
had a terrifying vision of his future: one little five-year-old in a classroom
of big, scary sixth graders! He didn't understand that all of the little kids
would grow up together and become the sixth grade meanies!
At The Whale
Hunters, we find a similar type of misunderstanding among business owners. It's
a mindset that makes you feel small even as your customers and competitors have
grown bigger and meaner. We hear you express this fear as a refusal to turn
down business that is no longer essential, profitable, or suitable for the
company you are becoming. You have grown as big and as important as all the
other sixth graders, but your self-perception hasn't grown alongside your
business.
Do you
ever feel like a minnow in a sea of whales?
Here are some
give-away comments:
- "It's not a great
deal for us, but the customer is prestigious."
- "This customer
may be too small for us today, but we'd better take them because they
might get big later."
- "We can't turn
down this deal; the customer is influential in our marketplace."
- "We've built this
business on doing the things that bigger companies turn down!"
How do
you break the minnow mindset?
The
consequences of this misunderstanding can be deadly to your business. Instead
of doing bigger deals, better deals, and more profitable deals to feed your
growth, you run the risk of devoting too much attention and too many resources
to a growing number of accounts that are too small for you.
Our key
recommendations:
- Outsource smaller
accounts to a strategic partner
- Develop your target
filter for new customers in terms of criteria that will feed your growth
- Measure and re-assess
how your business makes money
- Map your sales
processes to meet your criteria
- Manage your sales
organization to achieve evolving company goals
Can you cast
aside the minnow mindset?
Excerpt from Whale Hunting
Women, Volume I, by Barbara Weaver Smith. The Whale Hunters, 2009.
To learn about Whale Hunting
Women & to order your copy today, visit http://cli.gs/WHWEbook
Thank you for visiting this
post about Barbara Weaver Smith and Whale Hunting Women. Two people who comment during the tour will
be entered a giveaway – post a comment on any post about the tour and you will
be entered. The winners will win a three-volume audio set of Whale Hunters
Wisdom. Volumes include I: Mind of a Hunter, II: The Hunt, and
III: The Whale Hunting Culture ($90 value).
Barbara Weaver Smith's
website - http://www.thewhalehunters.com
Barbara Weaver Smith's blog -
http://blog.thewhalehunters.com
Order your copy of Whale
Hunting Women – http://cli.gs/WHWEbook
To see the tour schedule
visit http://virtualblogtour.blogspot.com/2009/04/whale-hunting-with-barbara-weaver-smith.html
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