"Like a general planning a battle, successful sales managers understand and apply the two basic laws that govern what they should do. Here's a brief overview of the two critical elements of success…

1. Understand the basic laws of business. There are four laws that provide most of the fundamental knowledge necessary to guide a successful sales manager's initial diagnosis and path to success…
   • Law #1: Costs and prices always decline. It's called the experience curve – the downward slope that shows the relationship between accumulated experience, and the long-term decline in costs and prices. Effective sales managers should know what the costs and prices of their, and their competitor’s products will be, over the period next year.
   • Law #2: Relative positioning determines your options. Sales performance improvement strategies will succeed only if they reflect a relative position in the market. That means that any sales activity should be based on the impact it will have on buyers, relative to the activities of rivals. Doing the same thing as others, generally creates parity that makes your company’s offer indistinguishable and undifferentiated.
   • Law #3: Customers and profit pools don't stand still. The total profit made by all of the elements of the value chain are known as the “profit pool”. Profit pools shift in predictable directions as customers' tastes and behaviours change. A great sales manager will anticipate profit pool shifts for 2010, and plan sales strategies, and tactics accordingly.
   • Law #4: Simplicity gets results. Humans can't focus on more than a few things at once. If you have too many products, too many options, too many layers of management, too many critical initiatives, you'll only wind up confusing people.
2. Chart a path to success. Charting this path is easiest when you break it down into its three component parts…
   • First, you must understand your point of departure. This is the existing condition of the sales operation as determined by the four laws above.
   • Once you have a solid understanding of where you are, you must determine where you want to be by the end of 2010. These are your goals. They should be inspiring enough to get people fired up, specific, and attainable enough, to keep the momentum going.
   • Finally, when you know where you are and where you're going, you can devise a "road to results" – a map, that lays out the critical actions that you will drive with your sales force in 2010.
   Have a great holiday and peaceful rest. And may your sales year in 2010 be one filled with success and achievement.