The first month of this year took me by surprise, I had such ambitions for this year but somehow I did not take the action that I intended for January, which sees me having to write a post about failing in the first month of the year.

I spent January waiting for 2 new deals to get closed, which would’ve seen R30 000 added to my January cash flow, it’s now the 5th February and these deals are still in the pipeline.

Waiting on those deals to close has hurt my cashflow for this month, I should’ve been focusing on finding more deals instead of stagnating on potential deals.

What we did last month:

Client work: We had some client work that needed to be finished from 2019, we spent the majority of January trying to get back to work mode after taking a break in December.

Which saw finishing those projects take a bit longer than I would’ve liked them to have taken, also took some time on the client’s side to get what I needed from them.

Business Setup: January was also spent on going through the business registration requirements, looking at our pricing and going through our accounting app.

Setting up a registered business was an interesting process to finally go through, you can read about it here: Legitimate Business

What’s on the agenda this month:

Conquering the cold sell: The thing I hate the most about being an entrepreneur is having to sell, it just so unnatural for me, I am someone who loves to help people and selling is the complete opposite of that but it’s the lifeblood of building a business.

So to grow my sales ability I’m going to have become one of those annoying salespeople but I want to find a more unique way of interacting with potential clients.

it going to come down to how I pitch, how I can help their business online.

Cold Emails: I’m going to send 10 cold emails a day (I know super spammy) which works out to 300 emails in a month, I don’t expect this method to be the most effective strategy but if I land 3 new clients that would have a positive effect on my cashflow.

Cold Calling: I would like to make 2 calls a day this month to potential clients but this method is more costly than sending emails, especially having to try to get past the gatekeepers.

The bottom line is selling is hard for me but it’s a vital skill that I need to develop for business to grow this year, cold calling & mailing will require a lot of refinement and strategy to make it work in the long run.

Hopefully next month I will be able to share some insight and the emails that I found to work at bringing in new business.