Whale Season
Why Do Some Companies Struggle to Catch Small Fish?
“These deals aren’t big enough!”
“We need to move up-market!”
“I’ll never hit my quota like this, it’s not worth my time!”
“It costs us more to support this tiny customer than our biggest client!”
Does this sound familiar?
Unless your product is 100% self-service, it’s very difficult to scale a business on small deals.
How many account managers do you need to support one hundred deals worth ten grand each? Now what about one customer worth a million dollars? No comparison, right?
And somehow your company performs BETTER when the stakes are higher! Employees rise to the challenge. Everyone is proud to be working on something important. Those big customers get your best. And that makes them happy.
Not to mention the sales rep who closes one deal and hits her quota, while the others keep endlessly negotiating for scraps.
What’s the story?
At Antimatter Consulting, we unleash Whale Season for our customers. How do we do this? Here it is in five steps.
🎯 Number One: Do Less - And Be More Specific
Unless you’re Serena Williams or Donald Glover, you can’t do everything better than everyone else.
If you’re catching too many small fish, it’s probably because you’re casting too wide a net.
First, read Treacy and Wiersema’s famous work on “Value Disciplines”. They explain that your company can only be great at ONE of these three things:
Operational Excellence (think Amazon or GE)
Customer Intimacy (American Express, JetBlue)
Product Leadership (Apple, Rolex)
Choose one and examine yourself from that unique perspective.
Then, read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. He’ll teach you to:
Pick a single target persona.
Develop the best end-to-end solution for their exact use case.
Focus 100% of your marketing and sales on this until you develop a beachhead. Then, and only then, broaden your market.
🐋 Number Two: Learn to Sing like a Whale
Whales have their own language, communicating over hundreds of miles. You need to learn this language. In other words, you must sing like a whale!
What does this mean in real life? Building on the last point from Moore: your marketing needs to tell the whole story of your perfect buyer. It’s an arc that looks like this:
Start with who they are and what’s going on in their world. Big picture. Think global economics, technical innovations, and political realities.
Define their specific problem by empathizing with their situation and their challenges. Don’t solve it yet, just show that you understand it.
Present a solution to their challenges, not yours. We know you think your company is cool because you have lots of features and whiz-bang technical solutions. But you’re only going to talk about how you solve their exact problem.
Then show real-world examples of how you’re helping people like them, changing that big picture world they live in one small step at a time.
Now you’re singing like a whale!
🎣 Number Three: More Rods Doesn’t Mean More Fish
If you have 3 reps that aren’t selling, hiring 10 more isn’t going to fix the problem. It’s your job as an executive team to prove that your products and services are sellable. You need to train your salespeople on exactly who they’re looking for, why that person would want to be your customer, and where to find them. If you (the founders and leaders of your firm) don’t know this, then how can you expect a brand new sales rep to succeed?
🐳🐳 Number Four: Whales Travel in Packs
(actually “pods” but who’s counting?)
You can never invest too much in making your whale projects successful. This applies whether your focus is on product leadership, customer intimacy, or operational excellence. Don’t catch one whale and then get fat on blubber for the rest of the year. Go above and beyond to make sure that once you’ve landed that customer, they are going to sing your praises, refer their friends, and bring you more business. Delight them. Hire top quality people to stay ahead of their needs. Get as much feedback as possible and push your business to find their next challenge and solve it before someone else does.
Once you find a whale, you don’t start over from scratch in a different pond. You follow that big beautiful mammal as closely as you can to find out where its friends live.
🌊 Number Five: Get Ready for Deep Water
You’re not going to catch a whale in shallow water. It’s going to take time and effort. There will be storms along the way. Be prepared to starve before you eat. If you’re thinking month-by-month, or even quarter-by-quarter, you’re in the wrong game.
Let’s open up Whale Season for your company: