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All organizations strive to become more proactive. And their employees are looking for the right initiatives to increase their proactivity. Here we will address a structure for proactive phone calls anyone in your organization can relate to and embrace.

Proactivity is about to be in the driving set for initiatives and where you need to repeat it daily to create a lasting impression. This could be a daunting task, especially to set the bar high for what you want to have accomplished before you reach out.

If you take some time to go through the feedback from your peers you will find some simple insights you can start to build from. The people who perceive you as most proactive have most likely gotten one or several of the following from you:

• You call them – you don’t start with sending a mail, or wait until they call you.
• You listen to them first – sometime you have a new idea to pitch, but often you need to listen to them to finds seeds for the new idea.
• You interact often via phone or face-to-face – the people you see as proactive towards you, reach out at least every two weeks.

In the information overload society your professional interfaces struggle with over-flowing mailboxes. And “proactive” mail is likely not generating any impact even if the intentions are good. Hand written postcards and phone calls have been giving way to mail, sms/txt and chat communication. If you want to stand out, the classic methods still have a lot to offer.

Good questions to ask in developing your perceived personal proactivity are:

1. How many interfaces can I be proactive towards? – Your own time will set the possible ambition level.
2. How many do I need to call every day? – Amount and routine is vital to get this going.
3. What do I need to be able to offer in each call to make them attractive to my counterpart? – Make sure you put their interests first, otherwise it can backfire.

For further insights in this area turn to:

• Five things proactive sales managers do differently [ARTICLE] – by Training industry (@TrainingIndustr)
• Four ways to be a more proactive sales person [BLOG] – by GrowthUniversity (@GUniversity)
• The difference between reactive and proactive sales coaching [BLOG] – by Gareth Goh,  Insight Squared (@Gareth_Giggs)

With these insights you can start tomorrow and call for the 3-4 people you decide to reach out to on a given day. as a base for rotating between your key targets every 2 weeks.