What is a sales cadence and how it can help your sales process?

With new leads constantly flowing through your sales pipeline, sales teams need to have a system in place. Having a structured approach in your sales process ensures that your sales team is effective. Leads get qualified, prospects get contacted, potential customers are being engaged and your sales reps are closing deals. Sales cadence helps sales teams to streamline their selling process and stay on top of things.

What is sales cadence?

A sales cadence is an outreach sequence consisting of multiple touchpoints, representing a series of engagements with a prospect across different channels in an effort to make a sale.

It involves reaching out and establishing a connection with your prospects, through email, calling, social media and other sales channels over a period of time. Sales cadence helps your sales team coordinate their prospecting efforts and develop relationships with potential customers.

In B2B sales, prospects prefer to be contacted multiple times through different channels, before they respond and make a purchase decision. This means that the sales cadence starts from the first contact and lasts right until the sale is closed.

While the frequency, channels, schedule and purpose of a sales cadence differ between teams and companies, the structured approach remains consistent.

Benefits of having a sales cadence

The main part of a sales cadence is having a well-defined sales structure so that the sales process can function properly and sales teams can sell more effectively. Companies with larger sales teams rely on the efficiency of their sales cadence.

Implementing a well-defined sales cadence increases the prospecting potential of your sales team by providing them with a structured sales process to work with. Aligning your sales cadence with your outbound sales strategy helps to improve your sales workflow and prospect to customer conversion rate.

What are the main benefits of having a sales cadence in place?

Focus your sales team’s effort

Sales reps can approach a prospect in a number of different ways. While some prefer to send an email and then quickly get on a call, others prefer to reach out over a couple of weeks to increase their chances of closing the deal.

It is important to know how far along in the sales pipeline your prospects are and at which stage of the sales process. By providing a consistent structure, sales cadence allows sales teams to track prospects. Sales reps will know exactly when to reach out and what is the right time to send a follow-up and give them a call.

A sales cadence can help shape and define your sales strategy and organize your sales outreach. This way your sales team has a clear sight of each step in your sales process and can focus their effort on selling.

Managing your sales pipeline

Having a proper sales structure in place also makes it easier for the sales team to optimize the process where needed. Since sales cadence allows your sales reps to track prospect engagement and refine the process where necessary.

For example, if you see that calling is more effective in the later stages of the outreach, you can adjust the sales cadence to include several steps in the beginning with the goal of connecting with prospects and establishing your relationship with them via email and on LinkedIn.

Being able to better manage your sales pipeline, you react faster and make the appropriate changes to your sales process, without the risk of losing valuable prospects.

Scaling up your sales process

A sales cadence not only helps your sales team in organizing their prospect outreach and tracking prospects through the sales funnel but also in bringing new sales reps up to speed.

Sales teams trying to manage an increasing number of prospects coming through the sales pipeline can be challenging as well. This represents the need of getting new sales reps on board to assist. At this point, scalability poses an obstacle in terms of how to get old and new sales reps on the same page.

Using a sales cadence solves this problem by having a structured sales process, making it easier for sales managers to organize their teams and for sales reps to take over prospects with relatively little to no friction in-between different sales stages.

How to create a successful sales cadence

A standard B2B sales cadence consists of multiple touchpoints, involving a combination of email, LinkedIn, and sales calls. The main goal is to connect with the prospect, establish a dialogue and make your sales pitch so you can reach the final selling stage and close the deal.

Sales cadence template

Here is an example of a B2B sales cadence template that combines multiple outreach channels. It consists of seven touchpoints and starts with an initial introduction email, afterward reaching out and connecting on LinkedIn, then scheduling a discovery call to qualify the prospects, doing a follow-up and finally arranging an appointment call.

Day 1 – Introductory email

Day 3 – Connect and message on LinkedIn

Day 7 – Follow-up email

Day 12 – Discovery call

Day 17 – Follow-up email

Day 21 – Appointment call

Day 24 – Follow-up email and call

Note that this only an example so you can better understand what is a sales cadence. The frequency between touchpoints, the day, and the time you send the emails or schedule the call can vary. The number of touchpoints, the timing and the channels, all play an important role and can make or break the success of your outbound sales.

Multiple follow-ups are a key point of the outreach sequence. Show your prospects that you’re determined, which cal help a lot, especially if they’re on the fence and are comparing different offers. If you’re not getting a response, however, even after several follow-ups, then it’s time to send a break-up email.

You can always try again down the line in the next quarter, in case, now was not the right time and the prospect is interested but your offer is not a priority at the moment. This is a common situation in B2B cold outreach.

Automate your sales cadence

Creating and maintaining a sales cadence is impossible without sales teams having access to sales automation tools. To be able to track and engage prospects through the sales pipeline requires providing your sales rep with a set of analytics and outreach tools so they can automate the process and do so effectively.

This way, sales teams are able to create prospect lists based on their ideal customer profile, set up multichannel sequences and add new prospects automatically. With the use of prospecting tools, they can also track prospect actions and see whether a prospect is ready to get on a call or needs additional following-up before they are ready to discuss a deal.

Sales tools are vital for having a well-structured sales cadence, improving your sales process and helping your sales team close more deals. That is how sales automation benefits sales teams to manage prospects successfully.

Tips for improving your sales cadence

As with any other part of the sales process, so does your sales cadence needs to be constantly optimized. Developing your sales cadence is one thing, but to make sure the process of turning a prospect into a customer goes without a hitch, sales teams need to monitor their metrics and adjust the cadence if needed.

In an effort to improve their sales cadence, sales teams should pay attention to several key parts that will guarantee the success of your prospecting outreach.

Prepare in advance

To make the most of your sales cadence, you need to first understand who your prospects are. That means having a clear sense of your target audience and not just adding prospects to your outreach sequence.

Creating an ideal customer profile gives sales teams a general idea of who they should be targeting. Knowing certain characteristics about your prospects, such as their company name, company size and their job title along with a couple of other data points, lets them prepare their sales cadence better.

Personalize your outreach

Knowing who your prospects are, also tells you how to reach out to them successfully. As your prospects expect you to reach out to them with a personalized message, this is where the information you have on them comes into play once again. Having reliable data on your potential customers allows you to make your messaging unique.

Figure out what their pain points might be and what challenges they’re facing. This gives you an opportunity to show them the value your offer represents for their situation. The more you understand about them and their business, the better your value proposition will be.

To further improve your outreach, segment your prospects. Group your prospects that share similar characteristics into segments and customize your messaging accordingly.

Plan your sales cadence

When planning out your sales cadence, you and your team have to decide, how many touchpoints the sequence will consist of and which channels will you implement in your outreach.

The number of touchpoints in the sequence depends on the type of outreach and the main goal of your campaign. For instance, a cadence for a cold outreach usually has a lot more touchpoints in contracts with one that meant to engage prospects that you’re sales reps have already been in contact with.

Which channels will you decide to use is another important decision. Prospects belonging to different segments can have varying preferences for specific channels. It is best however to combine different channels for greater effectiveness. This sales tactic increases your chances of success.

Implementing sales cadence in your sales

Having a sales cadence lets you structure your sales outreach and make sure your sales reps engage their prospects efficiently at every step of the sales process. It is also there to ensure that your prospects move without friction between different stages of the sales funnel.