Episode #390: Sales Can Be Depressing In Japan

I am having a bad run in sales at the moment and it is depressing. I am a constant networker attending events to meet potential clients. The leads we get to our website go to my sales team and so I have to hustle and get out there and make it happen. I do that and I follow up with the prospects to try to get a meeting or at least an introduction to a decision-maker.

Like everyone else, I get ghosted a lot of the time, but that doesn’t prevent me from following up again and again until there is no more point. I actually cannot recall anyone ever criticising me for my following up activities. If they ever did, I have my riposte ready to go. Would you like to hear it? Here we go. “Yes, you are correct. I do keep following up with potential clients. Your organisation has salespeople too, and wouldn’t you expect them to be following up with potential clients for your company’s growth and development? Well, that is what we do and by the way we teach sales and equip you salespeople to be better at the follow-up to win more business. Isn’t that something your organisation would value?”.

Amongst the clients I have been able to visit, there are the seeds of some potential training for them. This takes time and often they tell me to wait a little until they are ready to go. Naturally, I take note of that and I get back to them later to check in. I have had some clients on that cycle for over a year now.

It is very depressing though when they get back to you after you have followed up and say, “we are doing nothing this year and we won’t be spending anything on training until 2025”. When you get one of these, it is bad, but lately I am getting a number of these one after another. It is also leavened with this refrain, “our headquarters has put a freeze on hiring and training for the foreseeable future”. Ouch!

What do we do when we get slammed with these rejections and delays? If they come at reasonable intervals, it is one thing to deal with them. However, when you are pushing hard on the follow-up, you are lifting rocks to find poisonous spiders, centipedes and scorpions and have to deal with the product of your tenacity. I have been getting failures day after day for over a week now and I am constantly tasting the bitter ashes of defeat.

In this situation, we forget about our previous successes and abilities and focus on our current emasculation and inertia. This is dangerous because what we think determines our future success. We need to switch our mindset to the positive. It is a good idea to call past clients at this point, especially those happy clients, and ask how things are going.

For a start, they are going to take your call and will be happy to speak with you because you have built the trust and have provided value. It also reminds them that you are there. We tend to make a sale and then move on to the next sale and forget about keeping in touch with satisfied clients. There is a slight chance that they have a new need and bingo, we call them and this triggers some action on their part. At the least, it changes our mood to something more positive than the depression we are feeling about getting no new sales.

“Nana korobi, ya oki” is a Japanese saying I like, which means “fall down seven times, get up eight”. It is a bit like that advice to the cowboy who gets thrown from a bucking bronco, to get back up in the saddle immediately. This is important because if we think about it too much about it, we will talk ourselves out of getting back in the sales saddle.

So, get out there and attend networking events, call prospects and try to get a meeting. Call past clients and stir the embers of a possible deal. Dwelling on the failure component of what we do in sales will take us nowhere. We have to be positive and get on the front foot all the time, no matter how hard we are being driven down and pushed back. There is a success psychology in sales. It is based around self-belief. When that wall cracks, there is no going back and people drop out, never to return.