When economic times are hard, it is only natural for clients to want to cut costs. It is also only natural that they do so by reducing their reliance on outside parties and doing as much as possible in-house, or by dispensing with certain services all together. This means that if you're in the "dispensable" services category, such as training, marketing, translation, design, and technical support sectors, your company is probably also feeling the pinch of the recession. It can be very draining on sales staff morale when they go out to see clients and have to report back to the sales manager that yet another contract is going to be lost or reduced in size.

The government is ready to play ball on rice quotas.

Even during a recession, closely analyzing the economy can expose a wealth of profitable markets. Uniqlo is one, and rising SNS star GREE is another. But how can we identify the right markets?

For my own sales staff, and certainly for employees in new companies, which are perpetually in crunch mode until the company breaks through into profit, I have a sanity formula that I share with them. I call it my 70-20-10 rule.