Bag the Elephant!: How to Win and Keep Big Customers Book

Bag the Elephant! is more than a strategy book; it's packed with proven guidelines, tools, and techniques. Throughout the book you'll find stories, derived from the author's real-world experience, that show you how to put the strategy to work.

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Have you ever dreamed of landing that huge account the monster contract that dwarfs any deals you've made previously, dramatically increasing the size of your profits? "Bagging the Elephant" brings you new, deeper streams of revenue, and keeping that Elephant happy ensures profits for years to come.

If you are the owner of a small or medium-sized business, business expert Steve Kaplan shows you how to find the right Elephant for your business and business needs, navigate your way through huge companies, identify and secure internal champions, build strong alliances, and position your selling approach for maximum effectiveness. Are you afraid that your company's culture won't be a good match for an Elephant's culture? Bag the Elephant! explains how to align them to get the most out of your relationship. Are you having trouble finding the right decision maker in a prospect's company? Kaplan also shows you how to use the Elephant's inherent bureaucracy to your advantage.

Why are giant companies referred to as "Elephants"? Because they are huge, slow-moving, ponderous, strong, slow to react, often lovable, sometimes stubborn and because they require enormous amounts of input, which, if you can make it your job to supply, can bring you great financial rewards. Elephants are also smart, sometimes dangerous, uniquely individual, and equipped with long memories all reasons for you to be super-cautious and respectful when dealing with them.

Small Firm Thinks Big
Paula Westman owned a small CPA firm that specialized in tax returns, Kaplan writes. Over the course of 15 years, she had built a successful practice, preparing about 250 tax returns per year for individuals and smaller businesses, billing just over $300,000 annually. But the pressures of being a one-woman operation were burning her out. She lived with the concern that her business would collapse should she happen to become ill during peak tax season. She desperately wanted to expand her business so that she could hire other CPAs to help carry the load.

Clearly, Paula needed to bag an Elephant, but being in the service industry posed some unique challenges. Not the least of these was the fact that she couldn't imagine large companies needing her services. After some research, however, she found that there were large companies that provided tax planning and financial services to middle and senior management as perks, managed by the organizations' employee benefits department.

Paula put in a solid year of hard work to get her first big-company client. She worked out a deal with her Elephant that guaranteed her 225 returns per year for the next five years. This allowed her to hire three full-time junior CPAs to shoulder some of the load.

Paula's firm now handles only corporate clients, preparing 1,000 returns annually.

Answer Your Doubts
You might have doubts about pursuing business with big companies "bagging the Elephant." You might be saying one or all of the following things to yourself:

• "My business doesn't lend itself to big customers." Kaplan writes that one of the first things to learn is that almost any business in any industry can get big customers it's just a matter of knowing where to look.
• "I wouldn't even know where to begin." Beginning is the toughest part. Once you've made the commitment, it gets easier.
• "I've tried to get big customers, but it just didn't work out." Chances are at the time you didn't know what you needed to succeed. You may have gone after the wrong customer or mischaracterized your pitch. Try again. These are things that can be corrected.

The Elephant Really Does Need You
Kaplan writes that the first barrier to overcome in achieving success with big companies is the belief that those companies have no use for your goods or services. You must get over the assumption that no large company could possibly be interested in what you have to offer. The truth is, the Elephant needs you almost as much as you need the Elephant. As you'll see, after you've been together awhile after the Elephant has come to rely on your products and services, and you've become a larger, more powerful enterprise with other big clients the Elephant may end up needing you more than you need the Elephant. Copyright © 2006 Soundview Executive Book Summaries