Optimum cadences
Optimum cadences
within your outbound strategy
Planning is vital in sales.
A watertight sales process will ensure that opportunities don’t slip through the cracks; that prospects and customers at all stages of the buyers’ journey are engaged properly. Fail to develop a comprehensive sales development strategy, however, and you will see inconsistent, sporadic follow ups that result in fewer conversions.
Enter cadence.
Defined as a rhythmic sequence, it is perhaps more commonly heard when talking about beats per minute in music or tracking the pace of a run. Yet cadence is vital to any successful sales strategy too.
Sales cadence refers to the various actions a salesperson takes to close a deal with a customer, usually spread out over several days and incorporating a number of different contact methods – phone calls, emails, social media messages, video messages and more.
Sending out thousands of messages is easy – the challenge lies in identifying the right channel for those messages, at the right time. Which will produce the most success? Email is the most cost-effective outbound channel, but is it right for every customer?
The fact is, a multi-channel approach will always win more business. By contacting customers in multiple ways, across multiple channels, you are able to speak to them where they would prefer to be spoken to.
• On average, prospects need to hear from you seven times before making a purchase
• 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the hardest part of the sales process
• 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes
Creating a sales cadence
Developing an effective outbound sales cadence is essentially about creating a more effective follow-up plan.
There are no set rules: your cadence might contain two steps, or 30. It will depend on your business, what you are trying to achieve, your timeframes, job function and other factors, but all sales cadences begin with an initial point of contact, and end with either no response or (hopefully) a new customer.
In our white paper, How to Optimise your Outbound Strategy for Success, we provide two examples of what an effective sales cadence might look like.
• Option 1 comprises 10 touch points over 18 days.
• Option 2 comprises 16 touch points over 24 days.
Creating a sales cadence
Developing an effective outbound sales cadence is essentially about creating a more effective follow-up plan.
There are no set rules: your cadence might contain two steps, or 30. It will depend on your business, what you are trying to achieve, your timeframes, job function and other factors, but all sales cadences begin with an initial point of contact, and end with either no response or (hopefully) a new customer.
In our white paper, How to Optimise your Outbound Strategy for Success, we provide two examples of what an effective sales cadence might look like.
• Option 1 comprises 10 touch points over 18 days.
• Option 2 comprises 16 touch points over 24 days.
What is critical in both examples, however, is that there is an optimum mix of multiple channels. For example:
• Day 1: Email & phone
• Day 3: Video message
• Day 5: Phone & LinkedIn
• Day 6: Email
And so on…
Nurturing your cadence process
It is unlikely that you will nail your optimal sales cadence on the first try.
Like many other nuts and bolts of the outbound process, it is a continual process of improvement that will take time, trial and error. Methods like A/B testing can be a great way of quickly identifying the strong and weak points of a sales cadence, areas for elimination and areas for improvement.
It could be that your sales cadence is two weeks long, but more conversions would be seen if you were to expand your touchpoints over the course of a month. It could be that the core focus of your communication is email, but many of your prospects would prefer to be contacted via LinkedIn.
Pay attention to metrics and analyse your data.
If you’re unable to measure the success of your sales cadence then there is little point creating one in the first place, and it could even end up decreasing conversions.
Sending the right messages, at the right times, on the right channels is vital. Get it right, and there are plenty of rewards to be reaped, be it greater number of conversions, an optimised, time-efficient sales process, or ease of scalability.
You can download
our E-Book here…
to access a step-by-step guide on how to
optimise your Outbound Sales Strategy.
You can download
our E-Book here…
to access a step-by-step guide on how to
optimise your Outbound Sales Strategy.