Making sales to Japanese companies is never easy, and now it's harder than ever. But there is an old Japanese business saying about how a good salesperson will go visit with a client at least 10 times and get to know them before trying to get down to business (出来る営業は、まず客になりそうな客に10回通う。 その間、決して営業の話はしない。仲良くなったところで初めてビジネスの話をする。) These days you might get served a stalking warrant if you hound a client ten times, however, there is no doubt that persistence works.

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.

In 2006, I introduced in this column the social theory of an American psychologist called Abraham Maslow, who in the mid-20th century decided that in contrast to Jung and Freud, he would study what motivates normal people. His findings resulted in a simple layered pyramid, which he dubbed the "Hierarchy of Needs". According to Maslow, and certainly I agree with him, different people are motivated by different things according to the space they occupy physically and mentally.

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.

2009 is going to be a tough year, and if you are not yet working to expectations then next year things are going to be even tougher.

Performance expectations by senior management. Clearly this is important, because if in their general worry your management feel that sales people should suddenly be able to double or triple their productivity, then your job is in peril.

Today's column is for the sales people amongst us. The average smaller Japanese services company has somewhere between 30% and 50% of its employees working in sales, either as sales people and account managers or as support staff - so we're talking about a good chunk of the workforce.

The tradition of giving a Year-end gift to ones clients, guarantors, landlords, professors, and other respected parties started way back in the mists of Japanese feudal history.

Back in November, the government released statistics stating that Japan's unemployment fell a full 9% from 4% to just 3.7%. When I first saw this, I had just finished watching the latest TV news installment about how many more part-timers had just been fired by Japan's leading electronics and automobile makers. Talk about a contrast!

The Nikkei reported in November that Nikko Cordial Securities was planning to substantially reduce its 7,000-person work force by offering employees “early retirement” packages, otherwise known as redundancy packages in the West. Apparently employees aged 40 are the main target and given that the company has a strong seniority culture, it is understandable that it would make the offer to the older, more expensive employees first.