How to Build Sales Activity into Your Day and Three Time-Efficient Activities you Could Do

For every small business I work with that wants to grow, the greatest challenge seems to be doing proactive sales activity.

It’s easy to see why.

As a business owner, we have to sell our business services, but we also have to run the business.

We are Finance Directors, Client Managers, Fleet Managers, Operations Managers, HR Managers and everything else in between.

Couple that with the fact that most business owners don’t like selling then, with all our other priorities, it’s very easy for proactive sales activity to be put off for another day.

This, however, is folly and is actively holding you back from growing your business.

In my view, there is nothing more important than building a strong pipeline of future clients – it literally guarantees the future of your business - and the only way to take control of that is to proactively seek to speak to your prospective clients. You cannot rely on them simply coming to you.

As such, here are a few ways to begin to build in prospecting into your day-to-day life.

Build the Base

• Consistency is Key

The first step is to realise that consistency is key.

I have worked with some very, very talented salespeople. However, very often, they do inconsistent activity (often suffering from analysis paralysis). Invariably, despite their talent, their results are never as good as less talented sellers who simply do consistent activity every single day.

Consistency in sales always wins.

As such, the first step in a successful proactive sales campaign is to build in some time, daily, when you will do outbound activity

This can be as little as half an hour a day (though ideally more, bearing in mind that there is nothing more important than this activity) but build it in and stick to it – be very regimented with yourself about this and commit to it.

Even in half an hour you could reach 5 people. This would be 25 people a week or 1200 people a year (assuming a year is 48 weeks of work). That’s 1200 people who may have never heard of your business before, all for as little as half an hour a day.

• Struggling to find time? Then Prioritise Effectively

Look at your tasks and think to yourself “which of these tasks will make my business money?”

If you discuss this honestly with yourself, my suspicion is that you’ll be a tad shocked about how much you do in your day that doesn’t make your business money.

Prioritise the tasks that will make your business money.

I try to stick to an 80/20 rule, whereby 80% of my non-client-facing time is spent on money making activity, with the other 20% devoted to the wider tasks that need to be done to run a business. This doesn’t always work, but it’s a good principle to attempt to stick to.

You could also perhaps use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to help with this which will help you also filter through whether an “urgent” request from a client is really more important than you growing your own business.

If you do this and perhaps choose to outsource some of your tasks that don’t make you money, you’ll be amazed at how much time you can find in your day to do some proactive sales activity.

• Aim for Progress, not Perfection

A lot of us fail to do proactive work because we want what we’re going to say or write to be absolutely perfect. We then sit there and agonise before doing anything and, before you know it, it’s already 6pm and you have to start it all again tomorrow as your potential prospects will have all gone home.

Nothing is ever perfect, and activity matters far more than perfection.

As such, don’t sit and over analyse. The right way to do things will materialise with practice and time, so just get activity done and simply refine things as you go along.

3 Time Efficient Activities you can Build into your Day

• Dispelling a Myth – Use the Telephone

There are many people all over LinkedIn who say that “Cold Calling is Dead”.

Dear Reader, it’s not, and never has been.

If cold calling was dead, I wouldn’t get continued repeat business for my telesales services in 2024.

Picking up the phone remains the most time-efficient way to reach a lot of potential prospects in the shortest amount of time and has the added benefit that you can often speak directly to a decision maker.

Indeed, so few businesses now utilise the telephone, you’re actually more likely to stand out if you do.

If you are clear in your mind that you are calling to investigate whether you can help the other person and, in most cases, are not trying to sell your offering, but simply to get a meeting to talk about their challenges further you should not fear picking up the phone.

Also, if you think of it as “new conversations with new people” it becomes far less loaded than telling yourself that you are “Cold Calling”.

• Automated Emailing

I utilise automated email campaigns as a way for selling to be ongoing while I’m doing other things.

Services such as Apollo.io, Lemlist and others allow you to set up email campaigns that happen automatically and are really worth trying out to get some outbound activity happening consistently.

However, I would caution that this isn’t the holy grail and you couldn’t simply rely solely on a cold email campaign to generate the results you want. You would be far better to combine this with calling to maximise effectiveness

• Automated Social Media Outreach

By social media outreach, I mean directly messaging potential prospects, mainly on LinkedIn. Similar to automated email campaigns, you can use providers to automate this process.

Indeed, the services mentioned above can build in LinkedIn Messaging – or you can use a specialist bit of software like Dripify to do this for you, too.

A note about “Automated”

Automated doesn’t have to mean “generic or unrelated” – you can still craft relevant messages that speak to a person’s industry or job role and might bear relevance to their day-to-day challenges when doing an automated sequence.

That being said, also don’t pay too much heed to the moaners on LinkedIn. So what if you sent a generic, unrelated message by mistake? If they’re the type of person to complain about it on social media, you probably don’t want them as your client anyway as usually the people that do that have the biggest egos. Also, rarely, do they ever mention you directly as they don’t want recriminations themselves. On the flip side, it might be that you catch someone else at the exact right time and be successful at opening a conversation and it’s these people that matter.

I encourage you to be as relevant as you can be, but don’t panic about not being completely tailored – just get the messages out.

Now You’re Ready to Go

I believe wholeheartedly that every business owner can build the above into their daily routine and, if you are successful in doing so, you’ll have created a really solid sales foundation for your business to allow you to grow.

When you couple these efforts with any marketing then your business can really fly and you’ll be hiring your own seller in no time to help you grow further.

If, however, you cannot make this stick, then perhaps it’s time to look externally at a specialist service like my own (wink wink) and let me bring my expertise to build the consistent sales activity you need to grow your business.