Turn Sales Ideas into Revenue with the Five-Touch Action Plan
Meet Wilbur. Every month, he attends the sales meeting at his company. The sales VP, Sharon, is a big fan of organic growth, so she asks the team to share stories of how they brought new value to current customers.
In every meeting, the ideas fly. There is talk of embellishment upsells, postal promotions, trending tradeshow giveaways, fun formats for mailers, and more. Wilbur walks out of these meetings pumped up and ready to sell.
Back at his desk, he fires off emails and schedules meetings. Wilbur is good at getting initial meetings but underperforms when closing deals. Why? Because Wilbur is one of those print salespeople I call a “single-shot seller.”
Single-shot sellers are overly optimistic about expecting a single meeting to lead to a purchase and often mistake polite interest for an intent to buy. Therefore, they don’t have a plan to diligently follow up and turn initial interest into a sale.
Do single-shot sellers ever make a sale? Of course! We all get lucky sometimes, but if they implemented Thought Transformation’s five-touch action plan, they would sell more. Best of all, using AI tools like ChatGPT makes it easier.
The five-touch strategy follows this framework:
Click to enlarge.
A one-call close means you got lucky, and the buyer was ready to buy what you wanted to sell.
The five-touch action plan presented above increases the odds of making the sale when the buyer takes longer to decide. And now, AI tools like ChatGPT make developing a focused follow-up strategy easier.
Why not give it a try and see if it works for you? Good selling!
- Categories:
- Business Management - Marketing/Sales
Linda Bishop is the founder and president of Thought Transformation, a national sales and marketing consulting group helping printers and other companies achieve top-line growth through a combination of strategies, tools, training and tactics.
Her expertise includes all aspects of outbound selling and account acquisition, account retention and development, solution selling, marketing, and aligning sales processes with marketing strategies. Most recently, she published The ChatGPT Sales Playbook: Revolutionizing Sales with AI and believes AI will offer sales pros new tools for achieving revenue goals.
Before starting Thought Transformation in 2004, Linda sold commercial printing for seventeen years, working as a commission salesperson for the Atlanta division of RR Donnelley Company. She was one of the top performers in the Atlanta marketplace and had annual sales exceeding $9 million.
Linda has a BS degree in accounting from Purdue University and an MBA in marketing from Georgia State. She has written several books on sales topics, speaks nationally on sales and marketing, and has published many articles.
