Barbara Weaver Smith is founder and president of The Whale Hunters, a strategic sales coaching company that helps small businesses grow fast by selling bigger deals to bigger customers.

What are you doing to be a post-recession winner?

Historically, we know that recessions spur innovation, big ideas, new products, and new services that propel small companies to greatness.  Small companies benefit more than larger companies, simply because many big companies survive by cutting costs and dismissing personnel–not great innovation strategies.

So, if you’ve survived and (I hope) thrived during the recession, you should be poised to take your company to a much higher level of performance in 2011.

But it’s not automatic.  It’s time to adopt a whole new perspective on business development.

First,  three key pieces of investigation to complete: (more…)