Sales managers face a significant challenge in optimizing prospect engagement while maintaining professional persistence. The balance between consistent follow-up and respecting prospects’ time requires careful consideration, particularly when communicating complex product or service benefits.
Research from RAIN Group indicates that securing an initial meeting with a new prospect requires an average of eight contact points. However, sales representatives frequently discontinue their efforts before reaching this threshold, highlighting the necessity for a systematic approach to prospect engagement.
A structured sales cadence provides the framework necessary for maintaining this delicate balance. When properly implemented, it enables sales teams to conduct consistent, value-driven interactions that effectively guide prospects through the sales process.
What Is a Sales Cadence?
A sales cadence, or a sales sequence, comprises a strategically planned series of sales activities and methodologies designed to establish contact with prospects, facilitate engagement, and guide them through the customer journey.
Central to an effective sales cadence is a well-defined timeline that establishes the frequency of interactions. As research indicates, successful engagement typically requires a minimum of eight contact points over a predetermined period.
The Importance of Sales Cadence
To better understand the importance of a sales cadence, consider these crucial aspects:
- Your leads won’t slip through the cracks of your CRM.
- It allows you to create predictable revenue.
- Your sales team will have an established framework to follow.
- Your leads will move through the stages of the funnel, progressing toward closing deals.
- It enables better tracking and measurement of sales activities.
- It helps identify the most effective touchpoints and strategies.
- It ensures a consistent and systematic approach to sales outreach.
- It can increase efficiency by automating certain follow-up tasks.
- It improves the ability to personalize interactions with prospects.
Furthermore, this structured approach enhances the ability to deliver personalized interactions with prospects, strengthening relationship development — a fundamental aspect of successful sales engagement.
Here’s what you should bear in mind when creating your sales cadence.
How to Build a Sales Cadence
1. Identify Your Target Audience
The first step in building your sales cadence is identifying who your target audience is and establishing your buyer personas — these could be VPs, C-level executives, different managers, and directors.
You can’t have the same sales sequence for every buyer persona.
For example, what works for C-level executives is a greater number of personalized emails with fewer phone calls. On the other hand, when it comes to managers and supervisors, your sales sequence should consist of an equal number of emails, phone calls, and social media touchpoints.
2. Select the Right Communication Channels
A good sales cadence includes various channels of communication with your prospects — emails, phone calls, voicemail, LinkedIn InMail, or direct social media messages.
This way, you’ll be able to identify what each of your prospects prefers and use the information to fine-tune your sales sequence and focus on that particular medium.
Industries with shorter sales cycles and smaller deal sizes would benefit from a more aggressive approach, such as making phone calls immediately.
But if your sales cycles are longer and deal sizes are larger, you should start gradually warming up your prospects through email and social media messages and then introduce a more aggressive medium like the phone. Such a multi-channel approach enables you to optimize your engagement strategy based on prospect preferences, industry dynamics, and sales cycle characteristics.
Ultimately, setting up a sales cadence can significantly accelerate your sales cycle.
3. Define Your Unique Selling Point
The success of a sales cadence depends significantly on a clearly articulated value proposition. Organizations must identify and communicate their distinctive advantages compared to competitive offerings.
Key differentiation factors may include:
- Strategic pricing advantages
- Superior quality metrics
- Enhanced feature sets
- Exceptional customer experience
- Innovative problem-solving approaches
To refine the value proposition, organizations should analyze their existing customer base through targeted campaigns and direct feedback collection.
Understanding specific aspects of customer satisfaction, such as quantifiable productivity improvements or revenue enhancements, provides valuable insight for messaging development.
If you’re unsure which of these ideas works best for your target audience, analyze your existing customers. You can run a campaign and try to understand why your existing customers love your brand.
You can also ask them why they chose your product or service and what aspects of your solution appeal to them.
For example, formulate possible answers in the following manner:
- The solution successfully solved a problem X
- The solution helped me improve productivity by X percent
- The solution increased the revenue by X
This will make it easier for you to distill your marketing message and USP so that your campaign provides value to your prospects. In other words, you need to have a good reason to reach out to them every time, and with a strong USP, they won’t mind multiple emails from you.
4. Determine the Ideal Duration and Spacing Between the Activities
When we’re talking about the duration of your sales cycle, we’re referring to the length of your sales sequence from the very first touchpoint to the last one.
How long should a sales cadence last?
A sales cadence typically lasts between 2 to 4 weeks, though this can vary based on your industry and the complexity of the sales process.
If the prospect is not responsive, you can extend the cadence or switch to a longer-term nurture sequence. The goal is to stay persistent but not overwhelming, adjusting based on engagement and feedback.
In other words, you shouldn’t opt for a shorter sequence because that way, you’ll fail to properly engage your prospects and get them to respond or make their first move.
What about the time gap between outreach attempts?
Spacing is the time gap between contact attempts, and it’s crucial for making your sales cadence effective yet not spammy.
The ideal time gap between outreach attempts in a sales cadence can vary depending on your sales process and the target audience. However, a common approach is to use a mix of short and long intervals to balance persistence and respect for the prospect’s time.
Here’s a general guideline:
- Initial contact — Follow up within 1-2 business days after the first contact.
- Second attempt — If there’s no response, try again in 3-4 business days.
- Subsequent attempts — Space these out more as the cadence progresses, e.g., every 5-7 business days.
- Long-term follow-up: After several attempts, consider reaching out every 2-4 weeks.
Remember to monitor and adjust based on the engagement rates and responses you receive. Some industries or prospects may require a more aggressive or more relaxed approach.
Is there a formula for structuring your sales cadence?
While there are different opinions on how to structure a successful sales cadence, the following timeline can be a great starting point, and you can adjust it based on your results:
- day 1 – email/InMail
- day 3 – an email in the morning, a phone call in the afternoon
- day 5 – a call in the morning, a call with a voicemail in the afternoon
- day 7 – an email in the morning, a call with a voicemail in the afternoon
- day 10 – an email in the morning, a call with a voicemail in the afternoon.
You should conduct systematic A/B testing to optimize this framework for your specific circumstances.
5. Craft the Right Content for Your Cadence
It is evident that sending the same message with each outreach attempt is ineffective. The success of your sales cadence hinges on how you tailor content for each audience segment, communication channel, and outreach attempt.
Avoid employing guilt-inducing messages; while humor can be appropriate, it should not cross professional boundaries. Instead, focus on delivering versatile, valuable content that resonates with each segment.
Refrain from sending repetitive content or material filled with fluff — ensure that what you share offers tangible insights or solutions instead.
It’s important to Incorporate diverse content formats such as ebooks, infographics, webinars, blog posts, videos, case studies, and customer testimonials, which your prospects may find beneficial.
Creating a thoughtful sales sequence is essential for establishing a viable sales process capable of nurturing, qualifying, and converting leads. The key is to closely monitor campaign performance and adjust content, frequency, and communication channels based on analytics.
With tools like VanillaSoft’s Autoklose, you gain real-time insights into email engagement, allowing for continual refinement of your campaigns.
Remember that each piece of content should deliver measurable value to the prospect, addressing specific business challenges or opportunities.
In Conclusion
Having a well-structured sales cadence will result in getting your message across without annoying your prospects.
These tips can help you build a sales sequence that’s perfect from the technical point of view, but if you want it to really work, make sure you polish your messaging and make it resonate with your target audience.
