Promo 101 Promotional Interviews

Interview with Barbara Weaver Smith of The Whale Hunters

November 22, 2010 at 1:43 pm (author interview, author promotion, book promotion, business author, business book, business promotion, non fiction, non fiction author, online promotion, self help, virtual blog tour, virtual book tour, women in transition, write what you know) (bad economy, create jobs, grow small business, help for entrepreneurs, high unemployment, information for small buiness, the whale hunters, tough economic times)

You have been invited to share your promotional experience with others.

Your Name: Barbara Weaver Smith

Nikki Leigh – Where you are from and where are you now?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I lived for many years in Indiana, most recently in Indianapolis, but in the spring of this year I relocated to Scottsdale, AZ.  We moved our company to Arizona last year.
Nikki Leigh – How did you get started writing?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I have always loved to write.  As an English major and later as a professor, I wrote all kinds of academic papers, research papers, essays—the typical academic things.  But after I founded The Whale Hunters, it became very important to write the first book—Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company. Your first book is a required “calling card” or credibility factor for a consultant, speaker, coach and trainer.  I also write articles, newsletters, a blog, and curriculum and instructional materials to teach other people how to implement The Whale Hunters Process™.

Nikki Leigh –  What do you do when you are not writing?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I work ON my business, The Whale Hunters.  We are a team, and we  address our business development strategy and all of the concerns of a growing business.  I also manage The Whale Hunters website and our online community, Pier9.

When I am not working, I like to swim, golf, eat out, hang out with friends, sit on the balcony and watch birds, read, and watch movies on my new iPad.
Nikki Leigh –  What would readers like to know about you?

Barbara Weaver Smith – After working in bureaucratic organizations for many years (universities and a statewide nonprofit), I found that I loved being an entrepreneur.  I have had my own business since 1996 and founded The Whale Hunters in 2004.  Building a company, as opposed to just being an independent contractor or consultant, is the most challenging work I have ever undertaken.  Through my experiences, I have become inspired by America’s small business entrepreneurs who I help, teach, and encourage.  The founders and owners of independent businesses will be the saviors of the American economy.  I have a passion to help them succeed, to grow, to excel.

Nikki Leigh – What inspired your first book?

Barbara Weaver Smith – Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company was my first book.  It was inspired by the true story of the Inuit whale hunters, who live on the far northwest coast of Alaska, and who prepared all winter for an amazing whale hunt each spring, when the whales were migrating north to colder waters.  The Whale Hunters Process that we teach to business owners, executives, and sales people is derived from that process.  Since in its early days The Whale Hunters was a consulting company, it seemed important to write a book to explain our methodology.
Nikki Leigh –  How many books have you written?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I have now written seven books, with number 8 nearing completion.

Nikki Leigh – What are the titles of your books and what genres are they?

Barbara Weaver Smith – All of my books are nonfiction books about sales process and business development.

They include:

Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company
Winning Whales with an RFP
Whale Hunting Women
Mind of a Hunter: Cultivate Your Company’s Strategic Sales Mentality
The Hunt :Strengthen Your Sales Process to Accelerate Business Growth
Riding the Whale: Adapt Your Sales Strategies to Close Big Deals
The Whale Hunting Culture:  Engage Your Entire Company in Business Development

Nikki Leigh – Why are you specially qualified to write about this topic?

Barbara Weaver Smith – As you know I’ve had some interesting career transitions.  How did an English professor and university dean become the champion of small business sales development?  In some ways that you would probably not have predicted, some of my formal education was extremely relevant to selling.  I was a student of rhetoric—the original sales training, art of persuasion—and also a student of writing.  So I learned early on how to be persuasive and how to get into the head of my audience – which is a critically important sales skill.  But it was really after I started my first company that I began to apply this knowledge to the business arena.  I did a great deal of consulting on big messy collaborative projects that involved universities, businesses, schools, philanthropic organizations, and governments.  These were economic development projects, or regional planning projects, or new buildings or research facilities or joint ventures of all kinds.  And through that work I learned a lot about how to manage collaboration and how to manage change.  I invented a detailed change management process, which is now the foundation of The Whale Hunters methodologies.

Nikki Leigh – Tell us about The Whale Hunters?

Barbara Weaver Smith – The Whale Hunters is a strategic sales coaching company that helps small businesses grow fast by making bigger sales to bigger customers.  We define a “whale” as a new, targeted account that is 5 to 20 times large than your current average account.

Here’s how we deliver our services.  We have Certified Partners in (x) markets around the United States and even around the world.  They offer community workshops, for a variety of people from different companies, and private workshops, for your team alone.  They also offer chapters, where 12 – 15 entrepreneurs/owners/senior executives from noncompeting businesses come together monthly to learn and implement The Whale Hunters Process™ and to provide peer-to-peer deal coaching for one another.

Nikki Leigh – What are some unique methods of marketing you have used? Which were the most successful?

Barbara Weaver Smith – Our overall marketing strategy is built around “Free” – giving sample ideas, information, resources, materials, and experiences to our audiences.  We have three distinct marketing methods.

1. Partners.  We are building a community of Certified Whale Hunters Partners in major metropolitan regions around the US, and soon to be in Canada and Europe.  These Partners deliver Whale Hunters services in the form of chapter memberships, public workshops, and private (in house) workshops within their region.
2. Strategic Alliances.  The Whale Hunting strategy also involves identifying national and regional membership associations whose members could become whale hunters, and engaging them in our strategic alliance program where we offer free content and opportunities to their members in exchange for their bringing us visibility to their members.  We have both for-profit and nonprofit strategic allies, and we are building every day.
3. Social Media and Opt-In Email.  The third strategy is built on our opt-in email list, social media presence, and web site where we continually try to attract more entrepreneurs to join/sign up for free benefits.

My first unique method of marketing was to engage you, Nikki, to host my first Virtual Blog Tour in 2008.  That two-month tour greatly increased my online presence and introduced me to many bloggers and radio hosts who have remained friendly to The Whale Hunters.

We also offer “Virtual Preview Events” – free webinars each month to invite people to learn about opportunities to engage with The Whale Hunters.  I host a free “Expert Series Call” each month, which attracts increasing numbers of people, so that they can sample the ideas and business development content that we promote.
Nikki Leigh – What do you have in the works now?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I’m devoting much of my energies to the continued development of our website, creating new content for the website, writing new books and white papers, and training new Whale Hunters Certified Partners.

I’m also working to develop online, virtual training programs for Whale Hunters practitioners that will be delivered entirely online.

Nikki Leigh – What does the future hold for you and your books?

Barbara Weaver Smith – We are going to continue to build The Whale Hunters online community—Pier9—and intend to influence 500,000 small businesses by 2015.  I know that’s an ambitious goal, but it’s still less than 3% of the potential audience of entrepreneurs, just in the U.S. alone!  And we get lots of interest from other countries as well.

I will continue to write new books and to work with other Whale Hunters who want to write.  Our next project has the working title Whale Hunting at Work: Stories from the Field about Growing Small Businesses. Certified Partners are contributing the chapters; we hope to release it in January 2011.

Nikki Leigh – What was the most successful thing you did to promote your books and your business?

Barbara Weaver Smith – Promotion is a long, slow process.  I think it starts with being well-networked, partially in person but also on social media.  Invite people’s interest.  Find ways to meet them where they are in their business or their life.  I have continuing success in building an opt-in list for my newsletter.  That list continues to feed all of the other offers and activities that we have.

Nikki Leigh – What was the least successful thing you did to promote your books and your business?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I have made many presentations to groups of business women, entrepreneurs, executives and so forth.  These are always fun and I enjoy them, but they do not necessarily lead to new business commensurate with the time and travel spent.
Nikki Leigh – What makes your latest venture to launch The Whale Hunters special to you?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I love small business.  I have never been happier than when I became the head of my own companies, nor have I ever been so challenged and, occasionally, so afraid.  More important, in this economy, we cannot expect the big corporations to pull us out of the slump.  The economic recovery rests on the back of America’s entrepreneurs, and The Whale Hunters want to do our part to support their business development and growth.

Nikki Leigh – What sparks your creativity? Any tips to help others spark their own
creativity?

Barbara Weaver Smith – I am most creative when I have a disciplined goal.  In 2004 I started writing an article to be delivered faithfully every two weeks as a free resource to readers.  I’ve maintained that every two-weeks deadline for six years.  To get the Whale Hunting book completed, I had a very aggressive deadline from the publisher that I had to meet.  So as you can tell, deadlines help me.  But also, writing regularly helps to build a lot of content that makes its way into books and other forms of presentation.  I try to create some new content every day.  That makes me creative.

Also I read advice about how to get articles, blog posts, eBooks and longer books finished. There’s a quote that I love:  “Real artists ship.”  That means they finish their pieces, sell them, and ship them out.  To me, that’s the ultimate in creativity.

Nikki Leigh – The economy in the US is very strained at this time, what advantage or disadvantage do you think this economy offers to entrepreneurs?

Barbara Weaver Smith – Obviously the economy has been difficult for many if not most businesses.  Entrepreneurs are not immune, and The Whale Hunters have many clients who have had to scramble to keep their doors open and, especially, to avoid laying off key employees.  The biggest challenge my clients have faced is violating their target filters—bringing in whatever business there is in order to maintain cash flow and keep people working.  Now, as the economy is clearly improving, they need to regain their sense of choice and suitability of their new customers.

Clearly, however, economic downturns historically have been times of great opportunity for small businesses and times of great innovation.  Small companies are more agile, more inventive, and more creative than most big companies.  Big companies are hurting more.  They are laying off people, many of whom smaller companies have been able to hire.  They are cutting R&D budgets and other costs that will be disadvantageous to them for a very long time.  And they will find it much harder to recover.

For entrepreneurs, many of their competitors have gone out of business.  They have a great opportunity to gain market share and/or to acquire smaller or floundering companies that have great products and services.  Overall, a down economy FAVORS the entrepreneur.

Nikki Leigh – If a small business person thinks that your new website wouldn’t be of interest them, what would you say to convince them to take a closer look? I’m thinking something better than “Its the greatest website ever.” Give me something more specific

Barbara Weaver Smith – Here are the questions I would ask:

• Do you want to grow your business and exceed the typical standard of growth in your industry?
• Is there anything you or your team might need to learn about approaching bigger customers or growing the size of your deals?
• Are you dissatisfied with your rate of growth, your pipeline, or your predictions?
• Would you like to have everyone on your payroll working together on business development?

If you answered “Yes” to any one of those questions, then you should visit this website for answers, resources, training, events, discussions, and mostly—practical, proven ideas about how to grow your business fast.

Nikki Leigh – Why does this topic interest you? Why would it interest business people? Give us a hook to reel in new people.

Barbara Weaver Smith – Very few companies ever become $10 million or $25 million or $100 million companies.  The growth of their business often lags behind the development of their ideas, their products, their services, and their team.  Whale Hunting is a truly proven methodology to help small business entrepreneurs and executives break through to a path of continual growth matched with continually increasing company capabilities.

I am passionate about helping entrepreneurs and small business leaders build their companies to their maximum potential.  This is essential to revitalize the U.S. economy, and it is essential to many other economies that encourage entrepreneurship and private ownership.   Entrepreneurship is probably also the best way to help people in developing nations to establish a viable economy, as evidenced by many micro-finance programs.  The international community of entrepreneurs will continually build and rebuild global economic engines.

Nikki Leigh – If a blog visitor is thinking about buying a membership on your site as a gift for a friend, what would you tell them if you could speak to them for a few minutes?

Barbara Weaver Smith – Membership to The Whale Hunters site will help your friend to be more successful in growing his or her business.  It will be a sign that you believe in them, that you support their business goals, and that you know they are ready to take their business to the next level.

Nikki Leigh – Did I miss anything you want to tell my blog readers?

Barbara Weaver Smith – The process to join Pier9: They should visit www.thewhalehunters.com and “sign up” for the free basic membership.  This will ensure that they get our newsletter, invitations to all of the face-to-face and virtual events that we host (many are free), and have access to a limited but extensive collection of articles and forums.

When they have tested it out, they should UPGRADE to the paid membership and get ten times the material plus free access to all webinars for their year of membership—currently worth $600, for only $29.95 per month or $299 per year.

For a wealth of similar sales and business development articles, podcasts, webinars, training courses, and online discussions, visit www.thewhalehunters.com and join today! Basic membership is free.