220: Selling Year In Year Out (Part One)

<p>Journeymen salespeople are starting another year of selling.  Maybe their financial year is a calendar year or maybe the year wraps up in March.  It doesn’t matter, because there is a mental trick we play on ourselves that January 1st represents a new start, a new year.  Sales can be exhausting and 2020 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople.  Yet, here we go again.  How do we get ourselves back up into the saddle on that bucking bronco that is the sales life? </p> <p> </p> <p>In Japan, very few salespeople are basing their livelihood on full commission sales.  Here we have either a base and bonus or a base and commission system.  That means that if we don’t sell much we can still eat.  So the economic pressure here is less intense than in other markets.  It is also tricky to get fired for poor performance in Japan.  The courts expect the employer to reassign the sales failures into other jobs more suited to their lack of talent.  So the downside of not selling is not that cut throat here.  Also, the vast majority of salespeople are amateurs, not properly trained in the profession.  Rank amateurs bumbling their way along is the norm here, so no need to feel any social pressure either.</p> <p> </p> <p>In these circumstances it can be as if everyone in sales in Japan is sitting in a lukewarm bath – not too hot and not cold, but also not very exciting either.  “Blocking and tackling” was the basics of winning football games according to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers.  So with sales, prospecting and closing are the basics of sales.  We have to be farmers and hunters.  Finding new buyers and treasuring our existing buyers, looking for the reorder sequence to kick in. </p> <p> </p> <p>Know, like and trust are the basics of sales.  The buyer has to know who we are.  If they have never heard of us or never met us, then they won’t be buying anything from us.  The internet is a godsend because buyers can find us to solve a problem they are having and we didn