JF Uncut

With all the gloom and doom invading our every waking hour, I am reflecting on an amazing year, commercially – and looking forward to an incredibly exciting 2009 - but more of that tomorrow.

Let’s begin by looking at the improvements and upgrades we have made to our existing projects:

The Top Sales Experts team has expanded considerably without sacrificing any of the quality of our overall offering. In fact the high calibre of the latest intake has only enhanced our reputation for being the premier location, where the brightest, most knowledgeable and best known sales gurus congregate.

In December, we launched Phase One of our new TSE Resource Area, which included; a bi-monthly newsletter, jobs board, shop, webinars and we also syndicated thirty of the world’s best sales blogs. Phase Two launches early in January and I will be providing more details tomorrow.

I was particularly pleased to be introduced to Craig Klein the CEO of SalesNexus, who are now our sponsors on TSE: Craig is a very forward looking and innovative guy, who fully understands what we are aiming to achieve – he is a pleasure to work with.

The ever increasing popularity of Top 10 Sales Articles has taken us all by surprise. It is a very simple concept, which just seems to have captured everyone’s imagination. As you will know, we are currently in the middle of the “Top Sales Article Of The Year” campaign and already, in the first three days of the public poll being open, more people have voted than for the whole of last year’s contest. It’s very close race at the moment, but there are still another ten day’s to go before we announce the result, so plenty of time for a dark horse to come up on the rails.

In April, the new JF Consultancy site arrived, allowing me to showcase my new range of solutions and this is very much a work in progress: I am going to be spending about 60% of my time next year developing this initiative, with…..well that is 2009 news, so again,  you will have to wait until tomorrow I am afraid.

Many people, even those that know me well, often suggest that they lose track with all my activities, but in fact for me, there is of course a game plan; a short, medium and long–term strategy, which my team are very aware of. What they will never get used to is the steady stream of new ideas, which have to be fully explored and assessed for financial viability. But it keeps us all on our toes! 

As I mentioned the other day, when announcing the 2008 JF Awards nominees, this has been the year of the “Blog Grabbers” – no idea what I am talking about? OK, these are sites that come across and grab your blog post every day – or as regularly post. They then feature you on their site, and send you lots of incremental traffic and help to expand your “fan-base”

Three in particular, are offering an excellent service – The Customer Collective, Blogowogo, and Smart Draw. I am very happy to be working with all three and I can highly recommend them.

Of course, my daily drug is posting here. It gives me immense pleasure and is never, ever a chore – “best fun you can have with your jim-jams on” is how I described it recently. What has really surprised me is that visitor numbers just go on rising, week on week: To give you some idea, visitor numbers have increased by 107% this year, so far. And this year, I agreed to post weekly on The Sales Manager’s Mentor blog over at Sales Gravy, which has been fun.

I became involved with other excellent projects like: CanDoGo, Insightory, Account Maven and Sales HQ – I am looking forward to working with all of them again in 2009.

Finally, I must mention the host of new friends, acquaintances and business colleagues that I have connected with in 2008 – I am a people person, and this is one area of my activity that I most enjoy. They are of course, far too many to mention, but you know who you are!

Finally, finally, what about my existing contacts, friends and acquaintances? I am blessed to have a very wide circle of very good friends, located right round the globe, and I have enjoyed their friendship very much in 2008 – as I do every year!

“What about the book Jonathan?” I hear you ask.

“Wait until tomorrow!” I reply.

Tomorrow: All things 2009 – really exciting times ahead!!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS