What is a Sales Cadence, Why I need One

In today’s hyper-competitive market, a systematic approach to making sales can be a game changer. Enter Sales Cadence – a powerful strategy that streamlines your outreach through calls, texts, emails, and social messaging. Think of it as a well-orchestrated symphony where some parts can be automated, others manual, with plenty of room for hybrid approaches. With a sales cadence, you’re not just shooting in the dark; you’re following a repeatable, measurable process that reduces training time, fine-tunes your sales strategy, and gears you up for success. Read on to discover how Sales Cadence could be the missing puzzle piece in your sales process.

What is a Sales Cadence?

Sales Cadence, in its simplest form, is a strategic sequence of sales activities that a salesperson follows to engage prospects. It defines the ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘when’ of the sales process, setting a clear pattern for outreach activities. This involves an organized series of actions such as emails, phone calls, text messages, social media interactions, and even in-person meetings.

The beauty of a Sales Cadence lies in its structure and consistency. It’s not about making sporadic, unplanned attempts to contact a prospect, but rather a carefully designed, repeatable routine that increases the likelihood of engaging a prospect and closing a sale.

Remember, a successful Sales Cadence takes into consideration not just the timing and frequency of interactions, but also the channels used, the type of content delivered, and the unique needs and behaviors of the prospect. Ultimately, the goal of a Sales Cadence is to enhance communication, nurture relationships, and drive more predictable sales outcomes.

Why I Need One?

1. Improving Consistency: A sales cadence ensures every prospect receives consistent attention, minimizing the risk of leads falling through the cracks. It keeps your brand at the top of your prospects’ minds.
2. Increasing Efficiency: A defined cadence helps salespeople manage their time more efficiently and effectively. They know exactly when and how to reach out to leads, avoiding unnecessary guesswork and redundancy.
3. Enhancing Productivity: Automated components of a sales cadence free up time for salespeople to focus on high-level tasks such as relationship-building and closing deals.
4. Driving Better Engagement: By using a variety of communication channels, a sales cadence increases the chances of connecting with and engaging your prospects.
5. Offering Measurable Results: Sales cadences allow for easy tracking and analysis of sales activities, enabling you to refine your strategies based on what’s working and what isn’t.
6. Accountability: By measuring sales cadences, you can ensure your reps are engaging with their prospects and customers. This helps you identify true team players and bad actors.
7. Scalability: As your business grows, a sales cadence can easily be scaled to accommodate an expanding client base, ensuring that all prospects receive the same level of attention and follow-up. This can be enhanced through automaion, which we cover more in another article.

How do I build One?

There are a few foundational steps before creating one. It’s important to understand them because it can have a huge impact on the technology and patterns you use.

 Prequisites

1. Identify when your sales processes starts: You need to know when to start pitching or upselling a customer. Consider these examples. SaaS companies may rely on a customer to register to their site. A landscaping business may only take inbound calls. Retail may run on ads and customers who visit their location.
2. Choose a trigger to start a cadence: A trigger is the event that signals a cadence should start. The SaaS company may begin once a customer’s activity after sign up drops or they hit a paywall. The landscaping business may attempt outreach a few more times after failing to reach the customer. Retail may offer credit cards, email coupons, or an app to start their cadence
3. Identify communication channels: During the start of a sales journey, you may have had a chance to get their contact information. Without this, there is no way to continue. The SaaS company will collect emails, social accounts and phones upon sign up. The landscaping business has the phone number that reached out to them. Retail will need to entice customers to provide information during a sale to continue this process.
4. Find Steps to Automate: As you build a decision tree for your cadence, you’ll start to see things that could be automated. Keep those in mind for when you implement.
5. Ensure the Cadence Ends: This is the most important part especially if using automations to contact people. You do not want to spam. This will ruin your brand and create compliance nightmares. There needs to be clear points that remove contacts from a cadence automatically.

Building the Cadence

With the prequisites out of the way, you are ready to start creating a cadence! We recommend drawing the process out first. Then, leverage some form of software, even if it is just a google/excel sheet, to track and manage that you’ve been completing your activites. To truly scale, we recommend Salesforce and Canon Connect.

Salesforce is the leading CRM to manage your sales, service and customer pipelines. It will allow you track and automate many of your business processes. Canon Connect is Contact Center as a Service allowing you to call, text and schedule cadences all within Salesforce.

Before we buy any tools though, lets look at a diagram of what a sales cadence might look like.

Nothing crazy here, we just want to define what we’ll do for this sales process.

The caveat is if the cadence ends and we never made contact, consider if there is potential to reassess outreach at a future date. Another thing to consider is if the dates and activities should be different based on what your are selling, your relationship to the prospect/customer, and what you have already done.

A Robust Sales Cadence Example

We’ll also show you a robust cadence that our team built. We’ve defined this as our “Low Touch Email Led Lead Cadence.” The goal is to establish a connection with prospects we’ve never spoken to. It starts off with a trackable email to determine engagement and possible interest. We use this to be decrease pressure of a sale and promote awareness of our brand which can lead to future sales. 

In the diagram, we’ve defined different decision points that change how the cadence works. We’re able to track each engagement and automate what happens in response to those actions. This reduces the guess work for the team and eliminates manually data entry where ever possible.

That’s all for this guide, thanks for reading and if you are interested some help building or consultation on cadence strategies then reach out to us here at loosely canon! If you’d like to learn how to implement one, check out our article “How To Create Sales Cadences in Salesforce”