I've been avidly watching the HBO Series, John Adams, which is replete with the maxims and quotations that students of American history absorbed from years ago, especially those of Benjamin Franklin, who would no doubt have been a power-blogger but who must have been followed by his private secretary even into the bath. Franklin famously declared that "diplomacy is the art of the possible," but probably every Secretary of State since Thomas Jefferson has intoned that same belief since.
Today's Chief Revenue or Sales Officers, with broad authority for a worldwide sales staff, but with clients and prospects who themselves are focused on flexibility and innovation in a globalized world, are no longer happy with the "command and control" tactics made popular by large sales consulting firms in the nineties. That kind of rigid attention to process and a singular kind of solution-selling are going the way of perfectly aligned and disciplined ranks of Red-Coated cannon fodder.
With that in mind, and with the capability we've developed here at The Customer Collective to collect and collaborate ourselves on our own platform, we've been reaching out to the new breed of sales training and strategy consultants who represent this new view of selling in a global world. The first of these new thought leaders we'd like to introduce to you isJonathan Farrington, appropriately enough a Brit who lives in Paris (one for Mr. Adams and one for you, Mr. Jefferson), whose started his consultancy, JF Consulting, as a repudiation of the old ways of command and control, and who himself has formed a network of leading consultants called Top Sales Experts. We're very proud to be bringing Jonathan into our network here, and we'll be networking his network in the coming months as well. My interview with Jonathan ispodcast here as well.
Jonathan will be the first host on the Sales Sandbox, which means you can contact him directly and learn more about his ideas as they appear on the blog roll there. We're also wrapping up a host of new bloggers and some who are already familiar to TCC, whose concentration is selling in a global world.
I urge you to connect with Jonathan, who has offered to check in several times a day to take your questions, which can be either public or private (if you use the "send a message" function on his profile.) And have fun "playing" in the Sand Box.