Most small business owners never trained as salespeople. They’re brilliant at the actual work, but selling gets pushed aside the moment a big job lands, which sets off a feast-or-famine cycle that comes round again and again.
- You Stop Chasing After One Try
Picture a firm that spends a few thousand pounds exhibiting at a trade show, walks away with 40 business cards and never contacts half of them. That’s money straight in the bin. The leads were warm, but nobody picked up the phone a second time.
Research shows around 80% of sales need five or more follow-ups, yet most people give up after one. A short, specific email a week later that picks up where you left off isn’t pestering. It’s the bit that actually wins the work.
What to do instead is build a simple follow-up sequence and stick to it. A call, then an email, then another call spread over a couple of weeks will catch far more people than a single attempt ever will.
- You Sell to Anyone Who’ll Listen
When work is thin, it’s tempting to chase every enquiry going. The trouble is you can spend months pursuing a prospect who was never going to buy. They string you along, ask for three quotes and then vanish.
A clear ideal customer profile fixes this fast. Decide who you actually want to work with, what they spend, and what problems you solve best. Then you can stop wasting hours on people who’ll never sign.
This is also where outsourcing can earn its keep. Hand prospecting to a specialist like The Lead Generation Company and you can deal with several of these mistakes at once. A dedicated team handles the follow-up, sticks to a defined process and only targets the decision-makers who fit your criteria, which means your senior people aren’t tied up chasing cold leads.
- You Live and Die by Referrals
Referrals are lovely when they come, but they’re not a strategy. If word of mouth dries up for a quarter, you’ve got nothing in the pipeline and no way to turn the taps back on.
Outbound activity gives you control. Cold calling, targeted email and LinkedIn outreach all let you create demand instead of waiting for it. Just keep the UK rules in mind, as cold B2B calls and emails fall under PECR and data protection law, so it’s worth screening your call lists and keeping your outreach relevant. You don’t have to abandon referrals, you just need something running alongside them.
- You Let Senior People Do the Prospecting
Your most experienced staff are usually the best at closing deals and the worst use of time when it comes to cold prospecting. Every hour a director spends dialling lists is an hour they’re not spending on revenue they could actually bank.
The answer is to free up your senior people to do what they’re good at, and put prospecting in the hands of someone whose whole job is filling the diary with qualified appointments.
- You Have No Idea Where Leads Come From
If you can’t say where your last ten customers came from, you can’t repeat what worked. You end up spending on channels that do nothing and ignoring the ones quietly bringing in business.
Tracking your lead sources doesn’t need fancy software. A spreadsheet noting where each enquiry started will do at first. Once you can see the pattern, you can put your budget where it actually pays off.
To Wrap Up
None of these mistakes are unusual, and that’s the point. They’re easy to fall into when you’re busy and selling feels like the thing you’ll get to later. The good news is each one has a clear fix, whether that’s a tighter follow-up routine, a sharper idea of who you’re selling to, or handing the legwork to people who do it full-time. Sort even two or three of these and that feast-or-famine cycle starts to even out.
