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What do you sell? 20 years with one place is a long time.
1) Get on linkedin. Ask for customers and business partners to write you a recommendation.
2) Ask your customers what other vendors are hot and doing a good job. Never underestimate a customer's ability to pull strings to help you out.
3) Quantify your achievements. What percent of quota attainment did you get? Did you go to President's Club? Recruiters want someone who has history of achievement.
4) Start researching competitors and reaching out to them. It's highly unorthodox for companies to lay off sales people unless they are underperforming or part of an underperforming division. Smart companies layoff sales generators last. If you have a rolodex of strong customer relationships, you will be worth a lot of money to somebody.
5) Since you haven't looked for a job in 20 years, i highly recommend getting some career conseling and practice interviews. You will need to get comfortable discussing your accomplishments and turing that around into what you can do to help that employer. Start early in this. You want to be negotiating from a position of evaluating several opporutnites and not out of desperation for any job that gives you an offer. It's all about quantification of achievements, spinning these into applicability to the position, and closing on the next step in the "sales/interview" cycle. Ask for every job, you don't necessarily have to accept any.
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