219: Is That Light At The End Of The Sales Funnel I Can See

<p>Millions of people are being vaccinated for Covid-19.  Japan, being Japan, isn’t going to accept any old tests which were not performed on Japanese people.  That means that the vaccination programme in Japan is many months way from commencing and will take many more months after that to get to a 70% vaccination herd immunity stage.  Covid has driven people home to work there to avoid potential contact with carriers and superspreaders of the virus.  For a lot of tasks that probably works just fine and dandy, but sales isn’t one of them.</p> <p> </p> <p>Salespeople in Japan, even at the best of times, with normal client availability in play, love their existing clients and are not so keen on prospecting.  Going to see a client, where the relationship has been created and the trust is abundant, is the preferred conversation.  Cold calling a potential new client is definitely not preferred.  Covid has effectively reduced salespeople to their base of existing clients, with almost no ability to add new clients into the mix.</p> <p> </p> <p>Do we just reduce our business down to existing clients and hold our breath for the Suga san 4th cavalry to ride over the sandhill, waving a syringe in his hand to inoculate and save us?  Effectively, for many companies, this breath holding exercise is what they have been doing these last nine months or so.  Exhausting all of the existing client business leaves a big hole in the sale funnel and the prospects for a vaccine led sales recovery are still off in the dim, distant future.</p> <p> </p> <p>Are we going into 2021 with more of the same?  There are really only four options. One is wait for the vaccine to become readily available to allow salespeople to get back into the field and visit clients for face to face meetings.  A type of back to the future approach.  A second one is to hunker down with the existing clients and try and squeeze out any residue demand, all the while praying for the vaccine arrival to come soon.  This is the “what the hell” approach. A third one is to f