13 key sales activities that high-performing salespeople always do

High-performing sales teams see the value in strong client relationships, follow up diligently and do whatever it takes to progress and close deals.

To become a high-performing sales rep, you need to nail everything in this sales activities list. The best way to stay on top of your daily sales activities and ensure you’re doing everything you can to succeed is with sales activity tracking.

In this article, you’ll learn how you can optimize and organize each of your daily sales activities and what you can do to improve your workflow to become a high-performing sales rep.

Key takeaways from sales activities

• Sales activities are the tasks and actions sales teams perform (like calls, meetings, demos and follow-ups) to generate leads, nurture relationships and close deals.

• Tracking and optimizing the most important activities helps sales reps work more efficiently, prioritize high-impact actions and increase revenue predictability.

• Reps can often lose time on low-value tasks, but using a CRM to log, monitor and analyze sales activity ensures focus stays on the actions that drive results.

• Pipedrive’s sales-focused CRM makes managing these activities simple, offering pipeline visibility, task automation and reporting – try Pipedrive free for 14 days.

1. Centralize sales activities with a CRM

A CRM organizes your sales data in one place, so you can track activities more accurately and focus on those that drive revenue.

One of the biggest hurdles in identifying the most important sales activities is a lack of tracking.

If you don’t leverage sales activity tracking, you’re not going to know which activities are moving the needle closer to your revenue goals and sales KPIs.

A CRM is an invaluable sales tracking tool. By monitoring your contacts, deals and tasks, you can identify which activities work best for you. Not only that, but it’ll make your sales process much more efficient and effective.

Why? Because you’ll have an organized view of all your most important sales data in one place.

Every effective sales leader needs a sales activity tracker that offers them real-time information on their individual reps’ activities, ongoing team performance and data to enable sales forecasting.

Here are a few ways you should be using your CRM on a daily and weekly basis to track your activities:

• Track your deals. Every time a new deal comes through, add it to your CRM. Keeping an up-to-date, detailed view of your opportunities through pipeline management will help you see which activities and prospects you should prioritize on a daily basis.

• Keep on top of your contacts. When you engage with a new lead or a new stakeholder within a target account, keep a record of them in your CRM. You can keep track of the conversation and set reminders when it’s time to follow up.

• Track all deal stages. Every organization has its own sales process, so you need to align your pipeline with your process. Sit down with your team (and wider sales organization) to map out each core stage of your sales process.

• Collaborate with teammates. Sales is a group effort. If your sales force is using several different platforms, things can get messy. Most CRMs allow you to invite team members with ease, so make sure you take advantage of this feature.

• Take advantage of custom fields. Like your sales processes, the data you collect is unique. Adding custom fields for contact data, target accounts and pertinent information that will help you and your sales team onboard new sales reps faster, increase sales and boost conversion rates.

How Pipedrive can help

A CRM like Pipedrive lets you centralize contacts, deals and tasks in one intuitive platform, making it easier to identify which activities drive revenue.

For example, you can view calls made, emails sent and deal stage progress in Pipedrive’s sales dashboards. From here, you can see which outreach and follow‑up actions correlate with higher close rates. As a result, sales professionals can focus on what works and improve forecasting accuracy.

Here’s how a custom dashboard looks in Pipedrive:

Visualizing key activities in one place lets teams quickly spot trends, prioritize high-impact action and improve data-driven decision-making to move deals through the pipeline.

Whether you’re a small business using an Excel spreadsheet or a small sales team using a powerful CRM platform, this foundational step should act as a hub for the following activities in this guide.

2. Keep an eye on your sales data

Monitoring your sales data ensures you know what’s working and what’s not so you can make smarter, faster decisions.

Use data to monitor how you’re performing with prospects. Not only does data help you to achieve predictable revenue, it can also boost the buying experience and customer satisfaction.

The data you need to monitor includes anything you and your peers are doing to close a deal. Start by watching the obvious sales metrics:

• Emails

• Meetings

• Phone calls

• Attachments sent

• Marketing campaigns

• Product demonstrations

• Lead generation activity

By monitoring your data, you’ll be able to track the days, weeks and months leading up to a sale and determine what’s working and what’s not.

To make it easier, let’s break sales activity tracking down into a simple three-step process:

Use these three simple steps to pinpoint any holes in your sales strategy and to see where your strengths are.

How Pipedrive can help

Using a CRM is a time-savvy way to correlate action-based data from your sales activities. It can help you monitor:

• Forecast analysis. A low volume of prospects in your sales pipeline equals low sales opportunities.

• Territory coverage. See how well your sales team is performing in their assigned sales territories.

• Quota analysis. Track the sales productivity of everyone on your team to see who’s struggling to meet their quotas.

Keeping an eye on your data will help you make faster decisions, as you’ll have an informed idea of the challenges you’re up against (and how to overcome them).

3. Schedule your follow-up activities

Planning your follow-ups ensures that every task is executed on time and nothing falls through the cracks.

In a sales role, you’re likely to be juggling a number of different tasks and priorities. A schedule makes sure every task is executed properly.

If you don’t set yourself a schedule and limit the time spent on activities, you could find yourself wasting hours looking over metrics and spreadsheets while not achieving results.

If you plan to spend an hour generating leads on LinkedIn, move on to your next sales activity once that hour is up.

Prioritize the outcomes you want to achieve in a day, and then decide exactly what you or your team needs to do to get there.

How Pipedrive can help

Pipedrive helps you automate and streamline follow‑up activities so reps spend less time on manual tasks. The CRM’s email workflow automation lets you create trigger‑based sequences that send follow‑ups automatically based on deal stage, behavior or timing.

Here’s an example of an email automation sequence in Pipedrive:

These automations ensure every prospect gets the right message at the right moment.

Pipedrive also has AI‑powered email tools that draft and personalize emails from simple prompts, summarize long threads and highlight the next best action. Here’s an example of an AI-generated sales email in Pipedrive:

This AI functionality helps teams send tailored outreach at scale without extra admin. 

4. Warm prospects to advance deal flow

Focusing on warm leads lets you qualify deals faster and increase your chances of closing.

One of the best ways you can warm up a prospect is to build a trusting relationship with them.

Once a prospect is in your pipeline, keep them interested by offering them value. Do things like sending an email with a link to a blog post your prospect might find helpful, or keeping them in the loop about how much your product could help their business goals.

Show them that your existing customers love your product.

Social proof is one of the best ways to build trust with your prospects, so make accruing referrals a priority. According to research, top sales performers focus significant effort on getting referrals:

Don’t forget about leads that you might’ve put in your back pocket and forgotten about, either.

Following up with cold leads at the end of the year, when their next year’s budget is about to be finalized, is the perfect time to jump back onto a prospect’s radar.

Assuming things are going well at the target account, they may be more generous with their time at the end of the year (as well as their resources).

5. Qualify inbound leads

Qualify inbound leads by filling your pipeline with prospects that are interested in your product.

When you’re qualifying a lead, strip the process back to their first interaction with your product. How did they reach your website or find you?

Then, look at their website engagement. Did they visit your pricing page, or did they jump straight to your free ebook?

If a prospect has visited a pricing page, they’re going to be more valuable than a prospect who stumbled on your website to read top-of-funnel content.

Don’t spend too much time trying to decipher their movements on your website. Instead, have a conversation with them. The best way to figure out if they are a qualified lead is to build a simple checklist you can tick while you’re talking to them:

Ticking boxes on your checklist is the quickest and most painless way of putting a prospect into your sales pipeline.

How Pipedrive can help

Pipedrive helps teams prioritize potential customers by scoring leads based on engagement and fit, making it easier to focus on those most likely to convert.

Users can capture lead details in the leads inbox and add custom fields that reflect your ideal customer criteria. You can then use lead scoring tools (including custom scoring rules and the Data Enrichment feature) to assign values to key signals.

Here are some leads qualified in Pipedrive based on where they are in the buying journey:

This segmentation lets your team focus follow-ups on the highest-potential leads and reduce time spent on low-value prospects.

Qualifying leads is the best sales activity you can invest in before proceeding with the rest of the sales process. Not only does it make you more effective, as it allows you to spend less time chasing dead-end leads, but it also increases your win rate and your overall sales performance.

6. Make time for cold calling

Setting aside dedicated blocks for cold calling improves efficiency and increases the likelihood of booking meetings.

Make sure you’re making time in your schedule every week to make cold calls to highly targeted or “dream” prospects.

Cold calls have a notorious reputation for being unsuccessful, but you can change that by making a great first impression with your prospect.

The first few seconds of the call are crucial to its success. According to Gong’s research, the longer you’re able to hold your prospect on the line, the higher the chance you have of booking a meeting with them:

When sitting down to make cold calls, be sure to remove any distractions. For example:

• Keep your phone out of sight to avoid distracting notifications

• Close any browser tab that doesn’t involve the task at hand

• Make sure you’re in a quiet area that will allow you to connect with your prospect.

7. Personalize email outreach activity

Personalized, value-driven email outreach keeps you top of mind with prospects and improves engagement.

Staying at the front of your prospect’s mind is crucial if you hope to land them as a client.

Keep a steady stream of emails landing in your prospect’s inbox to make sure they don’t forget you.

Don’t make these messages about your product or service. Surprise them by sending something of value that will teach them about a relevant challenge (or even entertain them).

For example, you might send a whitepaper on relevant topics or just a message to say congratulations if their company celebrated a recent milestone.

Make your email outreach personal to make sure whatever lands in their inbox is enough to pique their interest.

Adding your prospect’s name to your emails and taking the time to customize them into something that gives them some value can make a massive difference in how they view you as a salesperson.

Not only will they feel important, it also helps build relationships. Email personalization shows recipients that you’re taking the time to craft a message for them. They won’t feel like they’re part of a mass email to everyone on your list.

8. Experiment with your timing

Testing the timing of calls and emails helps maximize engagement and response rates.

If you aren’t hitting the targets when it comes to emails and cold calls, try experimenting with when you’re sending them.

For example, when making cold calls, make sure you’re reaching out to your prospects at the right time so every conversation counts. According to PhoneBurner’s research, making calls either mid-morning or mid-afternoon will give you more chances of making a connection and having a business conversation:

Then, move on to your emails.

Take a look at the last six months of emails you’ve sent to prospects. Which ones landed you a meeting, and which ones didn’t even get opened? There’s a good chance that the emails that were getting opened were sent at specific times of the day.

9. Nurture customer relationships

Building strong relationships with customers drives repeat business and loyalty.

Start by interacting with customers on social media. Celebrate their wins and interact with their posts; share valuable content of theirs and give them any updates about your product you think might spark their interest.

Social media is a great way to respond to customer queries or concerns, too. It shows them that you’re listening and care about their problems.

Keep prospects engaged and happy by letting them know about any new product releases, services or deals your company has before they’re released to the wider public.

Not only is this a great way to build loyalty, but it’s an effective (and free) way to build up a bit of buzz around your new products.

Lastly, stay at the top of customers’ email inboxes and make sure that you’re always having a conversation with them. Use your CRM to create marketing automation campaigns that allow you to nurture your customer relationships, stay in touch and add value to their inbox.

How Pipedrive can help

Pipedrive helps users stay in regular contact with prospects and customers by centralizing all interactions in one place.

The CRM’s email tracking shows a complete communication history for each contact, letting reps pick up where they left off and deliver more meaningful follow‑ups.

You can also sync your email inbox, use templates and set reminders for future touchpoints to keep conversations going.

10. Organize and get control of your inbox

A clean and organized email inbox prevents missed opportunities and keeps your sales activities on track.

Your email inbox is a symbol of your overall sales success. If it’s a shambles, your sales activity probably will be as well.

The key to an organized inbox is to label emails from your prospects, teammates and current clients.

Many CRMs can help you fast-track the labeling process by only showing you emails linked to deals.

How Pipedrive can help

Pipedrive lets you narrow down your inbox with quick filters to only view:

• Emails that are linked to a deal

• Emails not linked to a deal

• Unread emails

• Emails with attachments

• Emails that are shared or not shared

• Emails addressed to you specifically

• A combination of the above attributes (e.g., all unread emails attached to deals)

These filters will help you focus on the most important tasks, and will also ensure you have access to all the past communication around a deal or customer. You’ll be more prepared for meetings and get a clear understanding of next steps.

11. Create and optimize your templates

Effective email templates save time and improve the consistency and quality of your outreach.

A good sales email includes three short sections to get your message across and tell your prospect what you need them to do next. When you’re creating your templates, follow this framework:

1. The intro. The subject and the first few sentences have to be attention-grabbing. It’s the difference between getting opened versus getting ignored or blocked.

2. The value proposition. What’s the main point of your email? Focus on value, demonstrating how you can solve a specific problem. A clear and concise benefit increases your chances of getting a response.

3. A clear call to action. Tell your prospect exactly what you want them to do. For example, booking a meeting or signing up for a demo.

Here’s what a template that follows the above principles looks like:

Having a foolproof arsenal of email templates can help you increase pipeline volume. For your cold sales email templates to be effective, you need to nail the following basic principles:

• They need to be specific to your pitch and narrative, maintaining the goal of leading your prospect into a presentation or meeting.

• If you’re trying to reach key decision makers, make sure the templates are short and to the point. Don’t waste anybody’s time.

• Lay out your prospect’s problem and what you’re going to do to solve it. Briefly show the differences between your solution and your competitor’s. Be clear on why your product is better.

• Customize your email subject lines so your prospect knows an email is meant for them and doesn’t feel like it was sent out in bulk.

• Keep it simple. Avoid HTML design (apart from relevant screenshots). All of your templates should be text-only and straight to the point.

• Use a strong call to action at the end of each email.

Once you’ve created your templates, A/B test them to see which works best in each situation. For example, you might find one template is better for cold emailing prospects than another.

Any good CRM will have a feature to quickly insert any template into an email, and allow you to customize fields like name and pipeline stage, too.

12. Communicate with your team

Regular team communication ensures alignment, accountability and better sales performance.

Every sales team is busy, but don’t use this as an excuse to not communicate.

Make sure you’re talking to everyone on your team. When you have a meeting, give it your full attention.

Showing up to a call or meeting isn’t just about physically being on the phone or in the meeting room. It’s about dedicating 100% of your attention to your team and to where your company is pushing your sales targets.

If you aren’t using it already, a productivity integration like Slack can help you keep everyone in the loop about everything from office conduct and invoicing to specific deals and prospects you might be focusing on.

13. Optimize appointment planning and researching

Streamlined appointment planning frees up time for selling and keeps your pipeline moving efficiently.

If you’re in the sales game, meetings take up a huge chunk of your day – and so does trying to organize them.

Many CRMs have built-in schedulers if you don’t want to use an extra tool.

How Pipedrive can help

Pipedrive’s built-in scheduler tool works to save you time and streamline your meeting setup.

In the dashboard, you can create a recurring event if you want to schedule a monthly or quarterly check-in with a customer, which is a great way to nurture a relationship:

Your prospect can also set up meetings in the timezone of their choice. If they wish to select a new timezone, they can click the timezone information and select their preferred location.

How to identify key sales activities

Your key sales activities are the actions that have the highest positive effect on achieving your sales goals.

These actions steer your conversations with prospects and ultimately determine whether they convert into a customer.

If you want to close more sales deals, focus on the activities that help you:

1. Approach. Identify your ideal prospects using criteria such as industry, company size and budget. Then, proactively reach out through calls, emails or social media to initiate contact. Track which approaches generate responses and refine your messaging to focus on the highest-converting outreach methods.

2. Meet. Schedule meetings with qualified prospects to build rapport and understand their needs. Prioritize meetings based on lead quality and potential deal size. Keep track of meeting outcomes to determine which types of meetings are most likely to advance deals.

3. Demonstrate. Present your product or service in a way that clearly addresses the prospect’s pain points. Use sales pitches, trials or case studies tailored to each prospect’s situation. Track engagement and feedback to see which demonstrations lead to follow-ups or conversions so you can optimize your approach over time.

The activities that support these three outcomes make up your key sales activities.

Structuring your week around these core sales activities means that every action contributes to moving deals forward.

Sales activities FAQs

Final thoughts

High-performing sales reps focus on the activities that move deals forward, from prospecting and follow-ups to lead qualification and relationship building.

Take control of your sales results by tracking your tasks, prioritizing high-impact actions and using data to refine your approach.

Pipedrive makes this simple by centralizing contacts, deals, emails and follow-ups in one platform, automating routine tasks and showing which actions drive results. Start optimizing your sales activities today with a free 14-day trial.