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Janus was a Roman mythological god that would understand our struggles as sales professionals today. He had a unique attribute that symbolizes one of our biggest sales skills challenges. This attribute allowed him to play two major roles simultaneously. Just like Janus, we also must play two notable roles. We are responsible for two specific job functions that are challenging and often in conflict with one another.

“If we sometimes feel like we’re being overwhelmed in our sales jobs, there’s a reason.”

Who Exactly Was Janus?
Janus was a Roman mythological god who had two faces on the same head looking in opposite directions. He could look both forwards and backwards at the same time. He had the capability to concurrently manage what had already occurred while planning for coming events. He was on the leading edge of multi-tasking, one could say.

How Are We Like Janus?
We perform two primary functions as sales professionals. We need Janus-like sales skills to pull this off because we have to perform both skills simultaneously. Our ability to do this is why sales professionals are often referred to as the elite athletes of the business world.  What are these functions?

1. We manage our existing accounts. Unless we have a sales job where we do nothing but missionary work, we have a group of customers that we must tend. This means keeping them happy and increasing the amount of business we do with them. This is not easy. Customers tend to be messy sometimes as we see from the sales tips, posts and comments throughout this sales blog.

2. We must find new business. Our customers leave us for a million reasons, frequently for reasons that have nothing to do with our sales skills. We are always on the lookout for new business from all quadrants in order to meet our ever-growing sales budget, to replace lost business and to find more profitable customers to displace less profitable ones.

Sales Tip Wrap Up
Simply stated, we have to manage a demanding account base while constantly looking under every rock for new business. Meeting that challenge means we must have:

1. Great time management skills.
2. Ability to work in confusing and unclear environments (both at our customers and at our employer).
3. Innate multi-tasking skills.

If we sometimes feel like we’re being overwhelmed in our sales jobs, there’s a reason. We have to be Janus, but with only one face.

Further reading: A reader asks why prospecting is such a big deal.

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Tags: career, customers, Prospecting

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