When I started school, I wanted to be an engineer. Eventually, though, college studies went from "Electrical Engineering" to "Eventually Economics." Enter the gift of gab, and a salesman was born.

Economics teaches many things about the world around us. It teaches us how to read trends and understand financial analyses. Every day one can go to the papers and find out the cost of losing in many ways; the loss of jobs, the price of stocks.

We do that every time we lose a contract. A contact we had last year for $100,000, that we lost this year, cost (mostly) $100,000. Easy to see, easy to track. But what about that bid we did not see because we were not at the right level of influence in an account? On paper, we find out that it was worth "X" amount, but what could it have led to in future sales? What was the cost of the lost opportunity?

We in sales sometimes have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees and seeing the opportunity because of the numbers. Sales goals are usually, "What did you do last time? Good. Add 10 percent." We can see that as a defined number. But we fail to see that, because we did not provide the right training or the right support, we could have produced 15 percent or even 20 percent growth. Yet that is not a loss in most minds, because we never saw it.

The same thing happens in market analysis. If we do not know the potential of a particular market, we may be quite pleased with 5 percent growth in an area, a number that matches the national growth model. If we had our intelligence correct we may be less than pleased to know the opportunity for growth in that area may have been 50 percent! We actually "lost" 45 percent growth. Who could be pleased with that?

Unless you ask about the cost of the lost opportunity, how will you know? Sun Tzu wrote, more than 1,000 years ago, to make sure the "process" did not become more important than the desired outcome. He understood opportunity cost.

So how do you factor opportunity cost into your sales and marketing plans? If we are not more aware of what the effects of not doing something are, and take them into account, we may very well be in the buggy whip business, getting an increasing share of a radically decreasing market. Strategies are static: delight the customer, grow your business profitably and fend off the competition.

The tactics, however, need to be fluid. If something does not work, agree that it did not work, and move on to the next. It just makes your next selection easier, as you have one less place to go. Take opportunity cost into account when you look at your tactics. Recognize there may be a better way if you all agree that the goal is getting there, not the scorecard of how it was accomplished. Don't be one of those who get hit by the train because you are arguing the best method of getting off the tracks.