Small non-autonomous perturbations around an equilibrium of a nonlinear delayed system are studied. Under appropriate assumptions, it is shown that the number of $T$-periodic solutions lying inside a bounded domain $\Omega\subset \R^N$ is, generically, at least $|\chi \pm 1|+1$, where $\chi$ denotes the Euler characteristic of $\Omega$. Moreover, some connections between the associated fixed point operator and the Poincar\'e operator are explored.