Barbara Weaver Smith

Dr. Barbara Weaver Smith is founder and CEO of The Whale Hunters®. Her sales and business development process is based on the collaborative culture of the Inuit people who engaged their entire village to hunt whales. Barbara teaches companies to rapidly increase their revenue through bigger sales to bigger customers. She supports her clients’ success with a steady stream of new content for consulting, speaking, and online training.

Barbara is in her third career. First she was an English professor, where she learned the art of sales from the rhetoric of its founder, Aristotle. She became a college dean before leaving academia for her second career as president as a statewide nonprofit agency affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her eclectic background has given her more than 20 years’ of rich experience in leading diverse groups of stakeholders to create purposeful, high stakes deals for education and community projects. In 1994, she took the entrepreneurial plunge and brought her knowledge and skills into the for-profit world.

Barbara’s project diversity and her first-hand leadership background in each economic sector makes her especially skilled at bridging the gaps among corporate silos and cultures to build powerful cross-functional teams that achieve superior revenue goals.

Barbara works with small and midsize companies to build the seamless processes that guarantee their continued growth, revenue, and profits and position them to compete with larger competitors for global customers. She also works with large corporations who struggle to organize the kind of internal cooperative culture that they need in order to become trusted advisors to and continually grow their business with their key accounts, including global accounts.

Barbara is a graduate of Anderson University and earned the M.A. and Ph.D. at Ball State University. She was named Sagamore of the Wabash, Indiana’s highest civilian honor, for exceptional community programs throughout the state. She lives in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area.