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Tokyo, Japan
Ron McFarland has been working in Japan for over 40 years, and he's spent more than 30 of them in international sales, sales management training, and expanding sales worldwide. He's worked in or been to more than 80 countries. Over the most recent 17 years, Ron had established distributors in the United States and throughout Europe for a Tokyo-headquartered, Japanese hardware cutting tool manufacturer. More recently, he's begun giving seminars in English and Japanese to people interested in his overseas travels and expanding business overseas. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Authored Comments
That was a very interesting article on funneling contributors. It follows a very similar trend in sales when salesmen are looking for new customers. You have to contact a certain number of people just to find one person that is interested in you (your product or the project you're working on)
Two important points:
One should never give up in his efforts to find contributors (or customers). They can come from the strangest places that you could have never dream of initially.
Second, even though in the end you have only one, two or three people that do all the real work, the problem is you don't know who those people are when you start. Sometimes major contributors themselves don't know how much they can contribute until everyone starts working together. Then, as things progress, they explode with energy and contribution.
It is great that you have weekly review meetings to confirm if you are on track or not. I have found doing sales training that some people work very hard looking for customers using a poorly developed customer list (They work very hard for few sales.) Others have a good customer list, but are too lazy to contact anyone. (They too generate few sales.) It is ideal to continue to review the contact list used, the method of contacting people and to confirm that people are actually being contacted.
The key is to continue to explore. One thing I've learned about open organizations and open sourcing is the value of building a quality community take time but it can achieve things that no one never thought possible.
Very interesting article DeLisa.
Are there any ideas on how to "seek out diverse perspectives and collaborate across teams and geos" on a worldwide scale? With translation technology advancing, I think that will be our challenge in the years ahead. I don't think this is just a Red Hat issue, but for all global companies in this new communication technology working environment. If Red Hat could lead the pack on this, it would be a great achievement.