What’s the most important thing in sales?
- Meeting targets
- Setting appointments
- Prospecting
Well, you have to do them all. But the one thing you need in order to get the desired results is a plan.
And that’s what most rookie salespeople don’t do. They don’t plan their day-to-day activities, or probably don’t even have a follow-up strategy or a sales cadence in place.
That’s a wrong approach.
The key to success in sales is to have a well-thought-out plan, and in this blog, we’ll talk about how you can go about creating a sales cadence that wins meetings and deals.
Definition of sales cadence
A sales cadence is a series of touch-points made by the sales rep over email, phone, social media, etc. to connect with the prospect for engagement or sale. The sales cadence starts at the first contact attempt and continues until the prospect shows interest and gets converted into a sales opportunity, or exists the cadence and goes under the nurture bucket.
For example, if you are an offering a free whitepaper on your website and someone fills out the web form, the sales cadence will look something like this:
Day 1: Send them the whitepaper over email and share a thing or two about your product or service.
Day 3: Send a follow-up email sharing an article similar to the whitepaper.
Day 7: Send them a LinkedIn connection with an InMail message.
Day 10: Give them a call and if they don’t respond, leave a voicemail and send them an email about the voicemail.
Day 12: Send a new email thread seeking permission to follow up.
Day 15: Send the breakup email.
If the prospect responds to your second touch-point, the prospect exists the sales cadence as they would have either shown interest and scheduled a meeting with you, or asked you to remove them off their mailing list.
How to create a sales cadence for your business?
Before you go ahead and create a sales cadence for your prospects, you need to understand that having one sales cadence may not be the best approach for all your prospects.
The idea of a sales cadence is to get in touch with the prospect across all channels. Some prospects prefer a professional approach like sending an email before an in-person meeting, while some are more receptive over a call or social media than email. As a sales rep, you need to collect as much information as possible about the prospect and plug it into your sales cadence.
Here are the key elements to consider while building a sales cadence.
- The Buyer Persona
- The Approach
- The Contact Attempts
- The Time Gap
- The Duration
- The Message
- Test and Optimize
- The Buyer Persona
Your sales cadence will differ for each buyer persona. For example, the cadence for C-level executives will include more personalized emails and lesser phone calls, while the sales cadence for managers will include an equal number of touch-points across email, social channels and phone calls.
If your company follows Account Based Selling (ABS), each of your Tier accounts can have a sales cadence. For example, you can follow an aggressive approach that includes 2-3 touch-points a day for over a period of 15 days to your Tier 1 accounts, whereas you can follow a more methodical approach that involves one touch-point each day for over a period of 30 days with your Tier 3 accounts.
Pro Tip: One of the best approaches to building a successful sales cadence is to segment your prospects into Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 accounts. And then create a sales cadence for each of the tier groups.
- The Approach
The most commonly used communication modes with prospects are email, phone, social channels, text messages, and voicemails. However, the mode of communication differs based on the industry and the individual. For example, direct mailers, handwritten notes, and in-person meetings are the most preferred communication methods for certain industries. Depending on your ideal customer profiles, your sales cadence has to include the desired communication channels to increase your chance of scheduling a meeting with the prospect.
Pro Tip: Identity what is the prospect’s preferred mode of communication. For example, if you find that your prospects are reading your emails but not attending your phone calls, you can add more email touch-points to your sales cadence.
- The Contact Attempts
The primary reason for a sales cadence is to have regular follow-ups with your prospects. And your sales cadence should include about 14-15 touch points spread across the best mode of communication with the prospect.
Pro Tip: Ideally your sales cadence should include about 8 email touch-points, 3 calls, and 3 LinkedIn or text messages.
- The Duration
The duration denotes the length of your sales cadence, from the initial touch-point until the last. Ideally, the sales cadence should be 2-4 weeks depending on the prospect’s engagement level with your touch-points. For example, if a prospect has shown no interest or not responded to any of your touch-points, you can stop pursuing them after two weeks. If the prospect has shown some passive interest—opened your email, connected with you on social media, follow you or your brand on Twitter—you can follow a four-week cadence to get a response—positive or negative—from the prospect.
Pro Tip: You can make more than one touch-point with a prospect in a day. For example, if you are calling the prospect and they don’t respond, you can leave a voicemail and also send an email mentioning that you’ve left a voicemail.
- The Time Gap
The time gap is the spacing between each contact attempts with a prospect. This is particularly important because you don’t want to bombard your prospects with too many contact attempts in a short span of time. Ideally, you need to keep a consistent time gap of say, 3-5 days between each touch point.
Pro Tip: A prospect usually shows interest within the first two weeks of contact. So a time gap of 3 days between each contact attempt is ideal in the initial two weeks and a gap of 5 days in the next two weeks.
- The Message
How are you going to approach the prospect? What are the contents of your email and social media messages? How should you open the call? Whatever you use as the mode of communication, your message should include the following:
- Why are you reaching out to the prospect?
- What can possibly be their pain point/need and how you can help them?
- What are the benefits to start a business relationship with you as opposed to your competition?
- List some of your customers who share similar pain point, or are of the same company size, or are from the same industry.
Pro Tip: Create a cold call script and use it as a reference while talking to prospects. If you are cold emailing, have a structure—the opening line, propose the value, CTA—and use it for all your emails.
- Test and optimize
So once you have your sales cadence, you can’t set and forget. You need to know if the cadence is working for you and bringing you the desired results. If you find that your prospects are more receptive over phone than on email and social media, tweak your sales cadence to add more phone follow-ups with the prospect. The idea here is to collect as much information as possible about the prospect and plug that information in your sales cadence with them.
Pro Tip: Prospects will be more receptive to phone calls during 2-4 PM because they are likely to be available post lunch and during the latter part of the day.
Sales Cadence Example
This four-week sales cadence works best for long sales cycle and large deal value.
Business day 1: Send an automated email with the information you would like to share.
Business day 3: Send LinkedIn connection request with a note. Send a personalized email in the afternoon.
Business day 7: Send a follow-up email at a different timing.
Business day 10: Call in the morning. Send a text message in the afternoon.
Business day 15: Send a new email thread with a different value-add. Send a LinkedIn message in the afternoon.
Business day 17: Call in the morning. Call in the afternoon; leave a voicemail and email if no response.
Business day 20: Send a LinkedIn message in the morning. Call in the afternoon.
Business day 25: Call in the morning. Call in the afternoon; leave a voicemail and email if no response.
Business day 30: Call in the morning. Send the breakup email in the afternoon.
Measure and track results
To judge the success of your sales cadence, you need to track the following metrics:
Email click rate: Since you send quite a number of emails to customers, it becomes all the more important to measure the performance of the emails. Are prospects reading your email? Are they finding the content engaging and clicking on the links? If your emails aren’t performing well, you always have room to tweak the content or even change the sequence of your email cadence.
Calls to conversations ratio: If are reaching prospects over calls but aren’t making enough conversations with them, you can probably tweak your cadence to call them at the time when they are available and receptive to calls. One of the ways to do that is to get in touch with the prospect the same time you had your last conversation with them.
Conversations to appointment ratio: Tracking the number of appointments gives you insights into whether you are reaching out to your targeting your ideal customer profiles. If you aren’t scheduling enough appointments, you should probably make changes to your buyer persona.
Sales cadence differs by industry, product, and the sales cycle. You can download these 4 sales cadence samples and use them as a starting point to create your own.
In the meantime, here’s one example of how an SDR used sales cadence to win a meeting with a Fortune 100 company. If you follow a sales cadence, share your workflow and best practices with us.
Radhika Bhangolai
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