Are you concerned that your sales rep may not have reached out to a prospect or followed up with them?
Do you worry about the frequency of potential customer touchpoints?
Are your sales reps making enough calls to each individual prospect at the right times?
All these questions and dilemmas signal that you need to develop a sales cadence for your team.
What Is a Sales Cadence?
A sales cadence is a strategic sequence of interactions with potential customers. It involves a planned series of communications across multiple channels, such as email, phone calls, social media, and even SMS. The goal of a sales cadence is to cultivate relationships with leads, provide them with relevant information at each stage of their buying journey, and ultimately guide them toward making a purchase.
Each touchpoint in the cadence is strategically planned and timed to maximize engagement and move prospects further down the sales funnel.
A well-designed sales cadence ensures that the right message is delivered to the right audience at the right time, ultimately leading to increased conversions and sales.
Why do you need a sales cadence?
Having a well-defined sales workflow takes the guesswork out of your sales process.
With an established sales cadence, your team will know exactly when to pick up the phone, whom to call, when to send an email, or when to move on to the next lead.
A solid framework helps simplify the sales process while making sure everyone on the team is following an optimized workflow.
How to create a successful sales call cadence
Developing the right cadence takes some thought and careful analysis, but it’s a worthwhile effort that will set your team up for success.
Here are some of the most important aspects to consider.
Tailor workflows to buyer’s journeys
You get leads from different sources — some may be quite “warm” because they’re referred by your existing customers. Others are colder because they are from a list broker, or they simply downloaded a free ebook and don’t expect a sales call.
Your sales cadence needs to take all engagement methods into consideration — calls, emails, downloads, and social media. To diversify your communication and get in touch with your leads using their preferred channel, it’s essential to create workflows for each type of interaction your team has with your prospects.
Here’s how you should do that:
- List all the ways prospects come into your sales funnel — referrals, subscriptions, downloads, free trials or demo requests, and target accounts.
- Design a workflow for each purchasing path.
- Map out what and when a sales rep should communicate during each interaction so prospects are moved further along the buyer’s journey.
For each touchpoint and interaction, create email templates and call scripts or set up general guidelines to further systemize your sales cadence to ensure your sales reps cover all the critical points.
Understand your sales structure and audience
If your business is more transactional in nature, you may have a faster sales process and fewer interactions with prospects before closing a sale.
On the other hand, if your business depends on customer relationships and multiple decision-makers or buying committees, you probably have a longer sales cycle with more customer touchpoints and interactions built into the process.
Adjust your sales cadence based on the role of your audience.
For instance, a CEO would have different priorities than a VP of sales. A CEO of a 10-person firm would have different needs than one who runs a 1,000-employee company. Take this kind of information into account to tailor your engagement strategy accordingly.
Optimize spacing and touchpoints
Many sales teams face the Goldilocks dilemma — reach out too often, and you’re a nuisance; let too much time go by, and you risk being forgotten.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how to best space out your interactions, but your sales cadence needs to strike the right balance with your prospects. Testing out different approaches and measuring results is the only way to find the right cadence that works for your audience.
Cadence also involves the prospect’s perception and entails more than the actual amount of time between contacts.
Using different channels such as phone, email, social media, or messaging apps introduces variety into your sales workflow and helps you identify the contact method each individual prospect prefers.
Coordinate with marketing
Gone are the days when marketing and sales don’t talk to each other. The brave new world requires sales and marketing to work closely together if you want to deliver a client-centric experience that will close more sales.
Design a plan to facilitate communication between marketing and sales. Have a predefined structure for your emails and conversations so everyone is on the same page.
Your team should have visibility into the entire sales process for each prospect. For example, if a potential customer just had an interaction with your social media team or downloaded online materials, you may want to postpone a sales follow-up or pick up the phone right away, depending on the circumstances.
In the rapid pace of business today, speed-to-lead is an essential tactic for achieving a higher conversion rate. If your sales and marketing teams aren’t well coordinated and in sync as to what the next step in the buyer’s journey is, your competitors will outsell you. Implement an integrated system so marketing and sales departments can track, score, and pass on leads to make sure prospects are contacted promptly.
Standardize workflows and track your metrics
How do you know if your carefully designed sales cadence is working, and what you can do to improve it?
- Standardize your workflows so everyone on the sales team follows the same process. A uniform process also helps ensure that high-quality leads don’t fall through the cracks.
- Implement a solution to track interactions and the results they produce so that you can fine-tune the workflows.
- Use a software solution that allows you to get real-time reports to make sure your team is following the timing and method of contact established for each workflow.
- Utilize a sales engagement platform to track your prospects, score the leads, analyze metrics, and generate reports for continued improvement and long-term success.
Know when to stop
Be persistent until you find a buyer who is serious, but know when to cut your losses. That doesn’t prove, however, that the effort was wasted.
Sending a buyer a breakup email is a great method to close a deal. These messages sent as a last resort are meant to provide a more genuine conclusion to a sales cycle. Apologies, information, transparency, and honesty are commonplace in emails sent during a breakup.
Never inform a potential customer they no longer have any value to you.
An effective breakup email should leave the door open for the prospect to reconsider. Such a narrative will help you gain the prospect’s trust and make a positive impression. Actually, circumstances may and do shift. You want people to remember you when the time comes when they require your services or goods.
Having a last point of contact with your lead also prevents you from wasting time attempting to nurture them further.
It’s a waste of time to contact a lead by email or phone if they aren’t interested in purchasing. Closure allows you to better allocate your team’s resources and generates a pool of “re-visits” for the next sales cycle.
A Sales Cadence Example: Putting It Into Practice
To truly understand the power of a sales cadence, let’s look at a practical example:
Target audience: Small business owners interested in a new CRM software.
Cadence goals: Generate interest, educate about the software’s benefits, and schedule a product demo.
Cadence timeline: 14 days
Touchpoints:
- Day 1: Personalized email introducing the CRM and its key features.
- Day 3: Follow-up email with a customer success story highlighting how the CRM solved a similar problem for another small business.
- Day 5: LinkedIn connection request with a brief, personalized message.
- Day 7: Phone call to answer any questions and further discuss how the CRM can benefit the prospect’s business.
- Day 10: Email sharing a blog post or video tutorial on how to get started with the CRM.
- Day 14: Final email offering a free consultation and personalized product demo.
Key considerations:
- Personalization. Tailor each message to the specific prospect and their industry.
- Value-driven content. Share resources that address the prospect’s pain points.
- Multiple channels. Utilize a mix of email, social media, and phone calls for maximum reach.
- Track & analyze. Monitor engagement at each touchpoint to refine your cadence.
This is just one example. The ideal sales cadence for your business will depend on your specific goals, target audience, and sales cycle. With VanillaSoft, you have the flexibility to create custom cadences that perfectly align with your unique sales strategy.
Over to you
Implementing a sales call cadence will help your sales team reach more prospects, build stronger relationships with them, and close more deals. This systematic and strategic approach to contacting and following up with your leads, using multiple channels and touchpoints, will boost your team’s chances of getting a response, engaging prospects, and moving them along the sales funnel. A sales cadence also helps you maximize your sales reps’ time and resources and enhance their overall sales performance while preventing missed opportunities. To create a successful sales call cadence, follow the steps we discussed and keep track of your metrics regularly.
