In February 2005 I stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf and threw a proverbial message in a bottle towards the Iranian shore. Three years and two months later it washed up on a reach of the Potomac River in Sterling, Virginia. In the ensuing days I made a new business associate and rekindled an old friendship.

In early 2005 when it became abundantly clear that Gartner's acquisition of META Group was a fait a compli I started to think about my future. As I was based in the Middle East at the time, as I was working for the acquired company, and as all strategic decisions were being made a long way away in Connecticut I thought it prudent to look around.

While I eventually took a job with Forrester as their Australia New Zealand country manager, I did for a time explore other options including approaching a few US-based companies for Middle East North African franchise rights. One of those was Huthwaite - the owners of the SPIN selling technique...

At that stage Huthwaite, who had started as a research company, had been around for about 30 years. To cut a long but excellent story very short, in the early days of the company, their founder Neil Rackham led a project focused on raising the productivity of a particular organisation. The results of that and many years of subsequent research resulted in the development of the SPIN (Situation Problem Implication Need) strategic selling technique. A few years back, Neil sold the rights to the technique and the name to some North American executives who embarked on building a business purely focused on sales effectiveness training.  They have gone exceedingly well ever since including their Australian and Asia Pacific arm which has won a few BRW awards for fast-growth. Anyway, back to 2005.

The Middle East was really beginning to hop yet it was still relatively unknown to non-Westerners outside the banking, oil and engineering industries. But media was booming, property was booming, ICT was booming, in fact every imaginable service industry was booming and continues to do so. What wasn't around was anyone like a Huthwaite or a Miller Heiman to assist organisations be more effective in client and business development relationships.

So I put a proposal together, sent it off to the CEO, we connected, I presented over the phone, and we started to talk about me flying over to present to the board in person. Then Forrester happened and I made the decision to pursue a career with a company I had always admired (still do), and take my family home.

Move ahead about 38 months. I've left Forrester. Longhaus is experiencing strong growth. Huthwaite is growing strongly throughout the US and firmly cemented in Australia and Asia Pacific. But here's where it gets really interesting. I have recently spoken to several government agencies about BDM maturity in IT organisations and literally just finished writing an article for Longview about the importance of sales effectiveness training to organisations embracing the changes enveloping CRM and corporate social computing (How Siebel Got it Right 10 Years Too Early), when my phone rang.

It was a former mentor of mine in Sydney who I had not spoken to in years. Mark had been a referee on my original Huthwaite proposal and he was ringing to tell me that someone from the US had called him trying to track me down. Apparently, my proposal from 2005 had just landed on his desk...and would I be interested in a chat.

As my original proposal and business plan (that has bobbed around for 3-years like the proverbial message in a bottle) can attest, I certainly did not predict the changes to CRM that would bring about a renaissance in the fortunes of sales effectiveness training companies. But I am truly glad to see that business has gone so well for Huthwaite in the intervening years. I am also even more convinced than I was back in 2005 that they are a company to  watch for any organisation considering investments in improved competitive advantage, or even for a CRM vendor seeking a sales process effectiveness partner.