jfa is Born
Over the past twenty years, my thirst for knowledge has been, and still is, unquenchable and I have read and listened to virtually every expert in my field who I hoped would help me on my journey: The business gurus, including: Jay Abrahams, Lee Iocca, John Harvey-Jones, Richard Branson, and Tom Peters; leaders in personal development, including: Steven Covey, Tony Buzan, Brian Tracy, Anthony Robbins, Zig Zigler, Dale Carnegie and of course, Earl Nightingale. I’ve attended the very best sales and management courses from Holdene to Huthewaite and Target to Miller-Heiman. I’ve also studied the great leaders including: Churchill, Shackleton, Montgomery, Elizabeth 1st, Ghandi, and Alexander the Great.
In 1994, I formed The jfa Groupwith the primary objective to deliver unique leadership and sales team development programmes to both the corporate and SME sectors.
Our aim, from day one, was to redefine the parameters governing organisational growth and work together with a small number of clients to develop commercial excellence, because we fully recognised that dependence on salespeople is critical to developing the latent capability of a business.
During this period jfa’s clients included AutoDesk (for whom we designed and delivered a ‘Channel’ programme for AutoDesk’s 150+ partners), France Telecom, Global One, Computer 2000 Group, Imass, ISI Group plc, F.I. Scotland, CISCO, Platinum Technology, Computer Associates, Belle Systems, Allied Dunbar Assurance plc, Exodus, Mclaren Consulting, and Dowco Investments.
Beyond jfa
In 2006, I created a small team to begin developing the JF brand, with one eye on my retirement from jfa. This involved writing articles and submitting them extensively; building what publishers call a “platform”, and generally increasing awareness of my work.
I finally sold my interests in jfa in the summer of 2006 and in October of that year I launched my very first blog – Thejfblogit – which, to my amazement, quickly became hugely popular, prompting me to move from posting weekly to every day.
In fact, it was the somewhat light-hearted “JF 2006 Article Directory Awards,” which attracted so much attention, that led me to conceive Top Sales Associates early in 2007. The primary objective of TSA is to promote the very best sales related solutions, products and development tools.
The first initiative, Top 10 Sales Articles was launched in April 2007 with the principle aim of “providing a single location where time strapped business captains, sales professionals and publishers can locate the top sales articles published every week.” This brought me into closer contact with a number of world-class sales experts and the Top Sales Experts team was formed, initially to act as an adjudication panel for Top 10 Sales Articles.
In order to gain increased exposure for my work and further develop my blogging skills, I accepted an invitation from b5 to write their leadership blog – Leadership Turn, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and actually it was the runner-up in the “2007 Best Leadership Blog” contest, much to my bewilderment. However, due to the demands of my other projects and changes within the editorial team, I left b5 in August.
In November 2007, the Top Sales Experts team began formalising their relationship and launched Top Sales Experts – twenty four of the most influential sales gurus globally, sharing ideas and collaborating on major projects. The team has gradually expanded and now numbers fifty four.
My passion for developing new and innovative sales solutions led to the concept of a brand new consultancy to promote my latest product offerings and so it was that The JF Consultancy launched in February 2008 and on the same day, all of the JF initiatives consolidated under the parent company, The Sales Corporation.
As a further example of that unrequited passion, I co-founded in June 2008 the Sales Book Awards with my good friend Jeb Blount of Sales Gravy Press, and it will be SGP who publish my first book, “Tougher At The Top” early in 2009.
A journey and certainly not a destination – to be resumed