I've been avidly watching the HBO Series, John Adams, which is replete with quotations that students of American history absorb and recall, especially those of Benjamin Franklin, who would have been a power-blogger if he were alive today and who must have been followed by his private secretary even into the bath. Franklin famously declared that "diplomacy is the art of the possible," an appropriate observation not only for the first Secretary of State but for anyone who has had to sell anything, particularly across borders and to a variety of cultures.
Today's Chief Revenue or Sales Officers, with broad authority for a worldwide sales staff, and 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 over at The Customer Collective to collect and collaborate about sales strategy on our own platform, we've been reaching out to the new breed of consultants who represent this improved view of selling in a global world. The first of these thought leaders we'd like to introduce to you is Jonathan Farrington, appropriately enough a Brit who lives in Paris (one for Mr. Adams and one for you, Mr. Jefferson), who 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 is podcast 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.