How to Build the Most Effective Sales Cadence

Ad hoc outreach just isn’t going to cut it any more. If you want to increase your pipeline and conversions, you have to work smart. You need more structure, organization, and easy tracking to move faster through that prospecting list of yours and smash those targets.

Short answer: you need an effective sales cadence. But what makes a sales cadence work?

Let’s start with the basics, run through how to build your own sales cadence (including best practices you probably don’t want to miss), and finish with an example. You know, just to make sure we’re all on the same road to sales success.

What is a sales cadence?

A sales cadence is a sequence of touchpoints from a salesperson to a prospect, in an attempt to engage them or make a sale.

Typically, it’s an outreach schedule for your sales team that lasts around two to four weeks, and the schedule can include various forms of contact – essentially any communication methods you can think of, but the main ones include:

• Phone
• Email
• Social media
• Direct mail

Why nailing your sales cadence is SO important

On average, it takes eight touchpoints to close a sale.

Seems like a lot of work, right? But by nailing your sales cadence, you can work far more efficiently and sell a lot smarter.

By creating a generic flow of outreach with a timely schedule for each touchpoint (or even automation with the right tools), you can adapt the outreach to each and every prospect. This will dramatically simplify – and ideally, speed up – your sales process.

What’s not to love about getting more engagement and sales in a shorter amount of time?

6 steps to building a sales cadence

Now we’ve convinced you with your two favorite things to hear (“less time” and “more engagement”), how do you go about building a sales cadence? Here’s what it takes:

1) Define your target audience

First things first, for your sales cadence to work, you need to be reaching out to the right people.

Targeting companies that aren’t a fit for your product or service will only lead to a big flop, and so will targeting the wrong people within the company.

To avoid this in your B2B sales efforts, you’ve got to define your target audience. The easiest way to finetune this definition is with an ideal customer profile, or ICP. Use a mixture of market research and your current client base to come up with a bunch of must-have and nice-to-have factors for companies you want to target – and win.

The good news? We’ve got a guide and ICP template for you to steal.

2) Segment and conquer

Now, there’s a chance that your target audience isn’t just one specific audience. Whether you are targeting different industries or markets, or whether you can split that one target audience into different segments like company size or similar, knowing where they differentiate is essential.

Understanding each segment will help you to cater for each one with different sales cadences. Look into specific pain points – as well as any deal winners or deal killers – for each, and build your value proposition around these to really catch each segment’s attention.

With target audience segmentation, prioritization of your sales team’s time and effort becomes a lot easier too. You’ll have your perfect fits, your close fits, your half fits, and your far-from-a-fits – plan your sales cadences accordingly.

3) Relate to communicate

On top of understanding your prospects’ pain points, you should look into each segments’ buyer behavior and habits. This research will have a part to play in figuring out the communication channels to include in your sales cadence.

Remember, a winning sales pitch will make it as easy as possible for the prospect to understand what you’re offering, see the potential for results, and sign that contract. ✏️

Because of this, email is often a preferred method of communication to have everything written up or displayed clearly and concisely. You can include links and videos to really educate your prospect, too – saving you a lot of talking time, and saving them a lot of listening time. That’s the beauty of an email; they can come round to it whenever suits them.

But when your prospect is likely to have an inbox full of sales emails (some good, some bad), how do you know yours will get seen?

Among many tips for standout sales messaging, you need to use your knowledge or their buyer behavior and habits in your sales sequence to make yourself unmissable to them.

This could be sending an initial email so your name is in their inbox. If there’s no response, you can try calling, then sending a follow-up email with all the relevant information and insights.

4) Work out your goals for each touchpoint

Like we said, eight touchpoints are average. But by figuring out your exact goal for each touchpoint, you might discover that you need more or less for specific prospects.

Sometimes your sales sequence might be effective with just two attempts to contact a prospect, and sometimes it might take 10.

What do you want to offer with each touchpoint? And how will each touchpoint encourage engagement from your prospect, and bring you closer to winning that deal?

For an effective sales process, think hard about these questions and sales cadence structure before calling that number or tapping out that email.

Consider things like whether your prospect is inbound or outbound. Why?

• Inbound leads will be more willing to hear from you as they’ve already expressed an interest. This means if they see your company name pop up in their inbox, they’ll be more likely to recognize it and engage.
• Outbound leads may take a little more education about what you do and how you’d work for them. Sales bait.

5) Schedule those touchpoints

Timing is everything. Working out the spacing of each touchpoint is an essential part of whether your sales cadence will swim… or sink.

Too much contact in quick succession can be overwhelming and pretty (/very) off-putting, but spread your outreach out too much, and you and your sales pitch can become forgettable, ignorable, or deletable.

You’ve got to get the perfect balance. Check out our sales cadence example just a couple scrolls down to help you work out the old sweet spot for each of your segments or prospects.

6) Know when (and how) to call it a day

Sometimes, you’ve just got to call it a day.

Use your research and experimenting to help determine when your efforts aren’t getting you to where you want to be. Whether it’s a prospect you might come back to at a later date because the timing isn’t right or the budget isn’t there right now (just two examples of some very common sales objections, by the way), or whether you realize the outbound lead was never a good fit after all, take it as a learning curve.

But don’t end on bad terms. Send a break-up email – you never know if and when they might come running back. Be available when they do, and keep relevant in their mind by connecting on LinkedIn.

5 best practices for sales cadences

Okay, so now you know the step-by-step process of building a sales cadence, what about some sales cadence best practices to really boost those closed deals?

1) Stick to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

We mentioned how helpful creating an ICP is before, and we have no problem with mentioning it again. But creating one is one thing, sticking to it is another.

So for the first sales cadence best practice: stick to it.

It will save you time on prospecting, segmenting, prioritizing, and researching into buyer behavior. What’s not to love?

2) Mix up your communication channels

Like we said, your sales cadence can be in the form of – or made up of – several different communication methods and channels.

Our tip? Use more than one.

If you continue to reach out using the same channel every single time, it can feel 1) intrusive and 2) a little bit annoying. They say persistence is key, and we’d have to agree – but persist in different formats.

This also helps you to build rapport with your prospects, which is not only essential to closing a deal, but also to keeping that client on board.

3) Spice up your content

If you want to stand out from the crowd (or the crowded inbox), you want to do something a bit different to grab the attention.

Generic sales messaging within sales cadences won’t get you anywhere, so be creative.

We might be a little biased, but we’d say one sure-fire way to get your prospect wanting more is to really play on their pain points with data-driven insights and results for what you’re selling. Show how you can change the way they work in the best way possible, and – trust us – you’ll be a hard pitch to ignore.

Sales Intelligence has got a bunch of features that will make you sell smarter, from the beginning to the end of your sales process. In terms of insights that will win you deals? It’s our Insights Generator that will probably catch your eye (and your prospects’ as a result).

4) Track, test, optimize

As much as we’d all like to get everything right in the first instance, it doesn’t always work out that way.

In sales, if you want to get as close to perfect as possible, you’ve got to experiment with every element of your sales process – including your sales cadences.

Monitor and track how well each touchpoint performs. When you see a low open rate or engagement rate, it’s time to switch something up.

5) Mate, you’ve got to automate

The best way to manage a sales cadence is to automate. Now, it’s important to realize that there still needs to be an element of personalization, but automation will save you a lot of time and brainpower. Automation is a much-loved word for sales teams everywhere, because it closes that execution gap.

Some of the best sales cadence tools and software for automation includes:

• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• EngageBay
• Outreach
• Salesmate

To choose the best option for you, you’ve got to consider things like the preferred modes of communication, whether you’re dealing with more inbound or outbound leads, ease of use for your whole team, and so on. So, do your research before committing to one.

Example of a successful sales cadence

Let’s see all the tips above in action, with an example of a successful sales cadence, shall we?

• Day 1: Send an email/InMail via LinkedIn
• Day 3: Send a follow-up email, then call later in the afternoon
• Day 5/6: Call in the morning, then leave a voicemail in the afternoon
• Day 8: Email in the morning, then leave another voicemail later that day
• Day 10: Round it off with both an email and call in the morning

This is just one example of an effective sales cadence, using the tips of multiple communication channels and strategically spaced out touchpoints. The content in your sales cadences will vary from segment to segment, organization to organization, and prospect to prospect, but the frequency and communication methods should always be structured and consistent.

Sell smarter with Similarweb Sales Intelligence

We’ve gathered that sales teams love the idea of selling more efficiently, because… well, why wouldn’t you?

From prospecting, to outreach, to account monitoring – Similarweb Sales Intelligence is your guy.

Here’s a little sneak peek into the goods we’ve got to offer:

• Lead Generator: Search our database of over 100m companies to create a list of your ideal prospects, and filter out the ones that aren’t a match.
• Contacts: Find the key decision-makers at the companies you’re interested in, and download their contact information (phone numbers and emails) at the click of a button.
• Insights Generator: Create effective outreach based on solving your prospect’s specific pain points and areas of opportunity.
• Account Review: Full insight into each account, including performance and technologies.
• Sales Signals: Spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and reduce churn with account alerts.

Yep, all that in one place. Sound good to you? Book a demo to find out how it can work for your business.

FAQs

What makes a good sales cadence?

A good sales cadence needs a great understanding of your target audience or audiences, and should be catered to the specific needs, buying habits and pain points of that audience.

What forms of outreach are best in a sales cadence?

The forms of communication in a sales cadence depends entirely on what your target audience prefers, and you can find this out through research and experimenting. It could be all via the phone call, or it could be a mix of phone calls, emails, social media outreach and direct mail, for example.

How do you perfect your sales cadence?

To perfect a sales cadence and make it as efficient as possible, you want to test it, refine it, and continuously optimize the process.