Many sales reps have been executing sales cadences to manage client communication better and optimize sale processes. Some still find it challenging to develop a sales cadence and get the most out of it for their business.
In this article, we’ll give you a clear overview of sales cadence, why you need it, what they need to get started, and more.
What Is Sales Cadence?
A sales cadence is a sequence of activities or touchpoints that a sales rep should follow to communicate with a prospect, engage them, help them understand the offerings, and nurture them into becoming an actual customer.
Why Is Sales Cadence Important?
Suppose you’re having trouble with managing the sales process, controlling client communications, and tracking where your prospects are in your sales funnel. In that case, you should start creating a sales cadence.
Typically, a sales cadence offers the following benefits:
- Know exactly who you should target, where you should reach out to them, and how you can do that effectively.
- Easily track what you’ve sent to a particular prospect and what you should do next with them. Never risk sending the same message twice or missing any step in the sales funnel.
- Allow you to maintain regular communication with prospects which is crucial to building trust and relationships.
- Ensure you’ll collect the most qualified prospects and acquire more customers.
Sales Cadence in Business
Sales cadence is helpful for businesses of all types, especially SaaS and B2B companies. As explained above, sales cadence can help optimize sales performance, boost conversion rates, and drive business growth. A well-designed sales cadence can also help improve the accuracy of sales forecasting.
What Is Sales Cadence in Salesforce?
In Salesforce, sales managers can use Sales Cadence Builder to create custom sales cadences to guide sales reps through handling different types of prospects. A sales cadence can include sending emails, making calls, arranging meetings, and sending text messages.
Sales Cadence Process: How to Build a Sales Cadence
Here are four steps to help you start creating a sales cadence:
Step 1: Do research
An effective sales cadence requires a clear understanding of product/service offerings and target audiences. Hence, you need to ensure you have a lot of information about your business and who you want to target before thinking about sale cadences.
Try to answer questions like:
- What makes your product/service unique? How is it different from your competitors?
- Who are your target audiences? What do they need? What are they looking for? What problems have they been through? What are their personal values?
- How does your product help solve your target audiences’ problems? Is your product the best solution, or are there any better alternatives?
Doing this will help you identify the right prospects you should focus on and avoid chasing bad leads.
Step 2: Identify communication channels
Your potential clients are no longer just on Gmail and Facebook but also on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and many other places. You don’t need to show up on every channel, but you need to be present on the platforms that most of your target audience are on. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on a lot of potential customers.
Step 3: Determine the total number of touchpoints, the time between the first and last attempt, and the time gap between contact attempts
The total number of touchpoints, for example, include like and shares on social media, personal message, email, video calls, and phone calls.
The time between the first and last attempt, for example, is 14 days from the first message you send to a prospect to the 14th day when you send the last follow-up email.
Regarding the time gap between contact attempts, for example, if you send the first email on day one and three days later, you follow up via LinkedIn messaging, then the gap is two days.
Step 4: Develop content
Now is the time to create compelling content to send to your potential clients based on what you understand about them and how your product fits their values. Use their languages to connect with them and initiate conversations quickly.
Sales Cadence Tools
It’s not about choosing the best sales cadence tools but picking the right one that serves your business’s needs and goals. If you’re looking for a sales cadence for sales teams, here are three options for you:
- Sales Cadence by Revenue Grid offers powerful automatic email sales sequences, activity tracking, a full recap of engagement, and real-time campaign analytics. It automatically syncs engagement data between your CRM, Outlook, Exchange, and Gmail.
- Google Calendar/Task is a free sales cadence tool. You can use it to schedule appointments, add steps to your calendar, send tasks to your reps, etc. Note that if your sales cadence involves many touchpoints, this tool might not be ideal.
- Mailshake is an email automation tool with built-in VOIP calls. It provides email templates and customization options to personalize emails and optimize campaigns.
Sales Cadence Example
A sales team can have several different sales cadences depending on the messaging or the channel they use to reach out to prospects. Common sales cadences include call, email, social, inbound, and outbound.
An Example of a Social Cadence for B2B
Day 1: Connect via LinkedIn Message
Day 2: Like + Comment
Day 4: Like + Comment (Cont.)
Day 6: Tag Prospects in Relevant Posts
Day 8: Like + Comment (Cont.)
Day 10: Share Content
Day 12: Tag Prospects in Relevant Posts
Day 14: Personal Message
Day 16: Email, Intent
Day 18: Call
An Example of an Email Cadence for SAAS
Day 1: Send personalized email
Day 5: Send the first follow-up email
Day 8: First phone call in the evening
Day 11: Send the second follow-up email
Day 18: Send the third follow-up email
Day 21: Send the last follow-up email
How to Measure the Results
You can use metrics and KPIs to measure sales cadence results. Focus on engagement levels, open rate, click rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, response rates, total number of appointment books, total number of phone calls made, etc.
Sales Cadence Best Practices
- Create high-quality content and ensure it’s relevant to your target audience. Try to diversify content with ebooks, videos, case studies, etc., to test their interests and identify what draws them most.
- Use CRM to manage your sales cadence. As you reach out to prospects, you’ll collect data about their engagement with your content. By integrating data into your CRM, you can create a single source of truth for customer information that everyone can access and update at any time.
- Test, test, and test. Constantly run A/B test your content, send time, time delay, etc., to determine what cadence works best for your business and audiences. Use metrics to analyze and measure results.
Now that you’ve understood everything about sales cadence. Get started with creating your own and see how it helps you get more opportunities.
