What Is Sticky?

What's sticky?

Sticky opportunities are the ones that come around and around and around.

They're not a one-time sale. They're a product or a service your customer has to keep using, long after the ink dries on the first deal.

Where Sticky Business Lives

Think about life insurance policies. Continuity programs. Training programs you can rebook year after year. These are the deals that keep paying you back long after you've closed them.

You Don't Get Sticky Without Trust

I spent years in the printing industry, and that business runs on sticky sales. The quarterly newsletter. The monthly mailing. The brochure that needs reprinting every season. None of it was a single sale. It was a relationship that kept producing work, month after month.

You don't get the sticky business without the relationship first. The quarterly newsletter doesn't happen because you asked once. It happens because the customer trusts you to show up again, and do it right every time.

That's the difference between a transaction and an account. A transaction closes once. A sticky account renews itself, and it renews because you built something worth renewing.

Before you chase the next deal, ask yourself: is this sticky? Will this customer need me again next year? In five years? If the answer's no, you're not building an account. You're making a sale.

The sticky opportunity pays over the decades, not over the days.

Roy Waterhouse is the founder of Lean Sales Group, where he coaches salespeople on building trust and growing accounts.