Sales cadence: What is it and why do you need one?

To stay connected with your audience, you need to be persistent with your communication. Just sending one email won’t have any impact. You need to create a series of touchpoints and execute them to stay on top of your customer’s mind.

That’s when sales cadence can prove beneficial to you. A sales cadence is a sequence of emails or texts that a company sends to stay in constant touch with its customers.

This is a comprehensive article on sales cadence, so if you’ve been considering adding sales cadences to your business strategy, you’ve reached the right place.

What is sales cadence?

Sales cadence is a series of carefully designed steps to increase the probability of conversion.

Let’s understand this in a simpler way:

The chances of converting your prospects into customers on the very first attempt are very thin. You need a series of activities to take follow-ups using various mediums, like calls, emails, and even texts sometimes.

A sales cadence is the combination of sales activities performed at the right time to achieve the best results.

Here is a small example:

You had a call with one of your prospects, and he agrees to take a product demo with you. The most effective step is to send a confirmation email with a link to your calendar, so the prospect can schedule a demo right away.

This small activity can increase the chances of scheduling a demo. Just like that, a sales cadence is a good mix of such activities to improve the chances of conversion.

Why do you need a sales cadence?

There are two main reasons why your team needs sales cadence:

1. Gives you a structure to follow
2. You can predict your revenue

Irrespective of the size of your sales team, implementing an appropriate cadence can make the process of client prospecting much more efficient and effective for sales reps. 

A cadence aims at bringing some diversity to your outreach across different channels. 

Understanding the difference between inbound and outbound sales is important when developing your sales cadence.

There are various reasons and purposes for implementing these inbound and outbound sales cadences as follows –

1. Provides pre-determined framework

Every sales rep has to interact multiple times with a client in order to get him/her on board. Sales cadence gives you a set structure to follow.

With the format set for every deal, you don’t have to guess what to do next. As the process is already designed mindfully, you simply have to follow the path. 

Sales cadence is the actions you define by assuming the responses of your prospects. You can be right or you can be wrong.

A pre-determined process maintains consistency between interactions and eliminates the guesswork.

2. Better tracking and revenue prediction

Once the sales cadence is in place, you can track the progress of your clientele. In simple words, when the process is set in any area of business, results can be predicted.

By following the process of how to treat every lead, you easily predict the outcome for every month or quarter. It will also be helpful in planning and optimizing the outbound sales strategy for future campaigns to get better outcomes. 

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3. Enhanced scalability

With the growing client base, managing these contacts manually is difficult. As a human, it is obvious to miss out on some of the clients or their details.

However, cadence certainly makes it easier to organize and track your prospects’ status. You can easily track where your prospects stand in the pipeline and can tag others in your sales team to get the work done.

Hence, you get better scalability by practicing effective sales cadence.

These are some of the reasons for which you need to have a sales cadence in the system.

Key elements of an effective sales cadence

Building the right sales cadence for your business requires trial and error until you find what works the best for you. Let’s learn about the key elements that will help you build an effective sales cadence: 

1. Learning about your target audience

The very initial step is understanding your target audience. Here, you need to research and do some homework about your target audience.  

You need to learn about the platform they’re most active on, their problems, and what sort of service they are seeking. By doing so, you can plan your cadence efficiently. 

2. Timing

Not only your efforts but your efforts at the right time will help you close more deals.  

Timing is a very crucial element of sales cadence. While you do not know how your prospect is spending his/her day, you can predict the same by looking at their profile.  

By looking at their profile, you can calculate their availability. However, the good part is- there’s nothing like the best time of the day to receive maximum responses.

So, there’s always room for trial-and-error methods to learn about the most suitable time. 

At the same time, you must take into account the time zone of your prospect. Whether you’re making a phone call or sending an email, you need to consider the time zone of your prospect.

3. Outreach channel

Your prospects are available on various platforms. So, you need to be available on as many platforms as possible. In fact, 67% of customers have purchased from brands that interact on social media platforms.

An ideal outreach channel is a balanced mixture of various platforms. It is a perfect blend of email, calls, and texts that make a good sales cadence because it covers every channel of communication. 

So, if you are designing a brand-new sales cadence, emails, calls, and texts are the three fundamentals.

You can include a step of social media connection as well. Not to forget, social media takes some time to build a network and professional identity. 

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4. Content quality

This element is very crucial. There are certain reps whose cadence is very short and effective that help them lock the deal.

On the other hand, there are reps having lengthy cadence and still not getting satisfactory results.

The reason is simple- the content. It is very important to decide the quality of your content. You need to draft your emails, text, and even the call pitches in such a manner that yields higher results.

It is important to note that without good content, your well-designed cadence will hardly work for your goals.

These were some of the key elements of sales cadence. Let’s learn how to create one!

How to create a good sales cadence?

Now, let’s learn about creating an ideal sales cadence to experience great results. Here are 3 major steps for creating a good sales cadence: 

Step 1: Research

You can always start the process by doing some research. This includes – 

Cadence objective– You can start by defining the objective of practicing the sales cadence. Your goals can be scheduling more demo calls or getting more sign-ups for the free trial or other goals. However. It is suggested to have small goals. 

Understanding target audience– You need to learn about your target audience. You can diversify them on various grounds like gender, age, geography, etc., Moreover, a buyer’s persona would assist you to refine your target customer.  

Assess the channels– You have multiple channels to communicate with your prospect. You need to decide what channels you’ll be using to communicate. Your cadence should have the right balance among multiple platforms.  

Step 2: Plan

Once you’ve done thorough research, the next step should be to plan out a well-defined sales cadence process.

Define touchpoints– While contacting your prospects, you need to finalize the number of touches you want to have with prospects. Create a list of offerings, and value propositions to make sure the number of touchpoints.

Intervals between touchpoints– There’s a thin line between being persistent and irritating. You need to make healthy follow-ups so that you don’t end up annoying the customer. It is suggested that initial touches should be a little frequent, but you have to space them out as time passes.   

Step 3: Automation

A series of actions can be really helpful to increase your sales figures. But we are humans and we do miss out on many things. 

An automated sales cadence with the help of CRM is the solution to this problem. The cadence will follow the instructions you give and perform the task automatically.  

You can design and execute a sales cadence with the predefined conditions you wish. So, all the tasks that you decide will be performed at your desired time. 

Click here to know how automated cadence works. 

How to measure and improve your sales cadence?

Automated tools are the clear answer to this question. There are specific metrics that will help you calculate the success of your campaign, and they are mentioned as follows:

1. Open rate and click rate

Simple to its name, it measures the mail opening rate. If the prospect has opened your email, it indicates that your subject line has done its job well and caught their attention.

And when the prospect clicks on the link mentioned in the mail, it justifies saying that the content has perfectly worked.  

Hence, this metric helps you determine if there’s room for improvement or modifications. It also helps to do some rework on your outreach strategy. 

Check all the metrics and measure your cadence performance!

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2. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses that your campaign could not be delivered to. With bounce rate metrics it is easy to measure the health of your mailing list. 

A high bounce rate is alarming and indicates that you need to buckle up and get rid of invalid email addresses. 

3. Response rate 

 With a high response rate, you can claim that the content is effective and works well. The content seems to be in alignment with the needs and pain points of the prospect.  

On the contrary, when the response rate is not good you can take the indication as the need to upgrade the content so that it gives a good response rate. 

4. A/B testing

Many a time, you are curious about which templates are the most effective ones. Which email has the best subject line or which mail has a better draft and which messaging strategies will work best?

In such scenarios, A/B testing is the right measure metric to be used. This metric is the most effective in terms of encouraging clicks and open rate. 

These are some of the metrics that help you to measure your sales cadence.  

5. Calls to appointment ratio

Calls to appointments ratio basically help you track the number of calls that have led to meetings. This helps you find out whether or not you are targeting the right audience.  

This even helps you figure out your next steps on whether you should focus more on the existing list or should back off from the same. 

Sales cadence best practices

Salespeople are always learning. So, with sales cadence too, you always have to focus on testing and optimization. Here’s a list of the 10 best sales cadences you can practice: 

1. Sales cadence based on buyer persona

Your buyer may belong to different age groups, sex, location, and background. So should your sales cadence. It is suggested to have different patterns for different personas. 

2. Sales cadence based on lead type

You should consider experimenting with sales cadence email templates and telephone scripts for leads coming through various channels, various demographic profiles, and with different goals. 

3. Define the number of touchpoints 

While practicing sales cadence, you need to reach out to the same prospect multiple times. However, you should know the number of follow-ups you’ll make.

4. Choose the right day and time to connect

Practicing sales cadence is all about timing your communication with your prospect. 

5. Right mixture of automation and personalization

Certain steps in the cadence are okay to be automated, but make sure to include personalization in some of the messages. 

6. Combination of email, texts, calls, and voicemails

A good sales cadence is a mixture of multiple communication channels. So, ensure that your sales strategy contains different communication channels for every outreach.

7. Highly personalized text and email templates

Sending emails has proven to be fruitful for ages. What’s more interesting is- sending personalized mail has a great number of responses. 

8. Consider the social relationship approach

Social media has become an inseparable part of our lives. And so, it has become a great way to connect with your prospects. 

9. Pick the right sales cadence software

Sales cadence software is a tool that eases your task by providing various efficient and time-saving functions. 

10. Measure metrics

Anything that can be measured can be improved. Hence, your analytics are an inseparable part of the cadence. 

These are just the gist of each practice. Here’s a detailed blog on sales cadence best practices. 

This article has some of the most insightful practices to be followed while fixing a sales cadence along with various scenarios. 

Effective sales cadence examples for every business

Now let’s learn about some of the most effective sales cadence examples. Here are 9 most useful examples:

• A typical B2B sales cadence 
• when clients don’t schedule a meeting 
• B2B Sales cadence for clients who don’t respond after the demo 
• Turn trial sign-ups to your paying customers 
• Sales cadence for enterprise customers 
• Sales cadence for the next customer base 
• Inbound sales cadence for prospects who fill in contact forms 
• Sales cadence for upselling 
• Sales cadence for cross-selling 

Here’s a detailed blog that contains the best sales cadence example of various scenarios mentioned above.  

10 best sales cadence tools you can use to execute your campaigns

Now, after having detailed insights on sales cadence. We are finally discussing one of the most crucial parts I.e., software for sales cadence.  

You have learned about automation in creating cadence steps above. Now, understand that selecting the right software is very important because if you settle for any software, you might not yield high results. 

Here’s a list of the best sales cadence software: 

• Salesmate 
• Outreach 
• Koncert 
• Freshsales 
• Keap 
• SalesLoft 
• EngageBay 
• Reply 
• Vanillasoft 
• Mailshake 

Hence, to help you select the right software for your process, here’s a detailed blog that helps you make decisions based on different factors while choosing sales cadence software.

5 Sales cadence email templates

Let’s understand these 5 steps in detail with the sales cadence we have designed. Let’s help John design his dream sales cadence.

Step 1: An introductory email after the signup

Hi Dave,

Thank you for choosing Confi for your conferencing needs.

I am John and I lead the sales team at Confi. My job is to make things as easy as possible for you. I am the guy you can call, text, and email for any help during and after your free trial of Confi.

Here is the link to activate your 15 days free trial:

[Link]

In case of any questions, my team and I will be ready to help you out.

Cheers!

Step 2: Feature-specific email

Hey Dave,

I hope you are enjoying the free trial of Confi. This is a very important email for you as a trial user because it will explain all the major features of Confi.

Feature 1 – Description

Feature 2 – Description

Feature 3 – Description

Feature 4 – Description

Feature 5 – Description

Please let me know if you face any problems while using Confi.

Cheers!

Step 3: Call to schedule a product demo

John: Hey Dave. John from Confi this side. I believe you have started taking our free trial a week ago.

Dave: Oh, hey John. Real pleasure connecting with you.

John: Pleasure is all mine, Dave. I just made a quick call if you are facing any issues with the product. We can set-up a demo where we can discuss and solve your problems in detail.

Dave: Yes. I would love to discuss some of the features that Confi has. I can’t understand the full potential of these features.

John: Definitely. Can we set the demo for tomorrow?

Dave: Sure. 8 PM sounds about right to me. Would that be suitable for you?

John: 8 PM works for me as well.

Step 4: Calendar link email + text message

Email:

Hey Dave,

As per our discussion over the call, I have scheduled the demo at 8 PM, tomorrow. Feel free to use the link below if your plans change:

[Calendar Link]

Cheers!

Text:

Hey Dave,

Your demo with Confi is scheduled for January 25th, 2020 at 8 PM. Please use the link below to change the date and time:

[Calendar Link]

Step 5: Email explaining your pricing plans

Hey Dave,

Today is the last day of your Confi free trial. We hope Confi has everything that you were looking for in a video conferencing tool.

I just quickly want you to go through our plans:

Silver – $ – Major features

Gold – $$ – Silver + Extra Features

Platinum – $$$ – Everything of Gold & more

You can learn more about our plans from the link below, and if you need any assistance with plans, you know how to reach me 🙂

[Link to pricing page]

Cheers!

Conclusion

Sales cadence is a constant form of communication with clients. A well-structured cadence will be the best roadmap to reach your target customers and achieve goals. 

But, remember the sales cadence process is a trial-and-error process and may require reiteration before finalizing one that actually works.

So, get started and implement your sales cadences to achieve desired results.

Click here, to start your free trial.