There is no denying the absolute fact that planning matters the most than ever in sales. Whether you’re building a sales process, writing a sales proposal, or creating a follow-up sales strategy, you need to have a well-thought sales plan to get the desired results. This plan would help you attract potential customers by providing them value and also get them actively involved with your company.
Prospecting seems to be the most challenging part of the sales process. The key to getting a positive response is to monitor your prospects regularly and create a lead generation marketing strategy for your business. For this, you need to define your sales process using sales cadence for your business. With a reliable sales sequence tool and effective sales cadence, salespeople can focus on more critical areas, such as effective call execution.
Read on to learn how to build an effective sales cadence to make your sales team more productive and implement best practices to your team’s selling efforts. Before deep-diving into building sales prospecting cadence, let’s first examine what a sales cadence is.
What Is A Sales Cadence?
In business, sales cadence is a sequence of touchpoints with a prospect for establishing a relationship for engagement or a sale. It is defined as a schedule for sales reps to follow up with each sales prospect via phone, email, social media channels, etc.
Sales cadence gets started at the first point of contact. It continues through a sequence of interactions until the opportunity is either converted into a sales opportunity or exits the cadence.
Importance Of Sales Cadence
A sales cadence’s main objective is to diversify your reach by engaging potential customers through different channels. Some opportunities are easier to receive over the phone, while others prefer email or social media. Hence, your sales cadence must include multiple channels to connect with your target customers. Adopting a sales cadence for your business can accelerate business growth, help sales reps improve their engagement with customers with less effort, and maximize deal opportunities.
Benefits Of Sales Cadence For Sales Reps
Sales reps have a follow-up series of calls and emails for every prospect. A structured framework eliminates guesswork and ensures consistency between every prospective customer interaction.
Sales reps can close more deals by following up with your prospects regularly. This ensures that your prospects progress through the stages of your sales funnel.
Benefits Of Sales Cadence For Businesses
Outbound prospecting can bring more quality leads to your business. The conversion rate is useless without a follow-up strategy. Combining a sales cadence with your outbound sales strategy can increase conversion rates and help your business run smoothly. A sales cadence is designed in such a manner that makes every sales rep follow the same process. Maintaining a consistent sales cadence that works for your business is one of the keys to estimating accurate numbers.
How To Build A Sales Prospecting Cadence
Setting a sales cadence is not a one-time process. It depends on the target market persona, product/services, region, etc. It’s all about trial and error methods until you find a cadence that works best for your unique business needs.
- You Should Understand Your Target Audience
Research and analyze your potential goals, what platforms they primarily use, what problems they face, and how your decision will benefit them.
- You Should Use The Medium Of Communication
A good sales cadence includes phone calls, email, voicemail, text messages, social media channels, etc., to help you achieve your goals. Always list the platforms your users are most likely to be active on. If your prospects are more active on Linkedin Inmails than on phone calls, take advantage of this by getting them into your cadence.
- You Should Contact Prospects For Some Specific Number Of Times
You need to contact the prospects at least seven times to get their response. So, the perfect cadence should have anywhere between 6-12 touchpoints.
- You Should Make Sure Of The Spacing Of The Touchpoints
The time difference between points of contact is very important because you don’t want to bombard and confuse a target with so many points of contact at the same time. They need time and peace to read your content, analyze and interpret how you could help them, and then decide. Ideally, the sales rep should include a good two-day gap between points of contact.
- You Should Be Aware Of The Duration Of The Cadence
Duration is the length of the sales cadence. It is from the first touchpoint to the last. The exact timing of your sales cadence should be about two but not more than four weeks. It depends on the prospect’s engagement with your emails and calls.
- You Should Always Categorize Your Targets
One of the best approaches to increasing the sales cadence is first analyzing and dividing your list into three-tier accounts one, two, and three. You can do it by classifying them by company size, industry, persona, region, etc. In the same way, you can organize them according to a professional hierarchy. Once you have broken down your contact list into levels, you can design a cadence for each level based on approaching them, the number of touchpoints, the cadence’s duration, and social media channels.
- You Should Create A Creative Content
The probability that your customers will contact you depends on the quality and creativity of your email content. To achieve your goals, your content must be creative, engaging, and informative. If you have a perfect sales cadence with average content, your cadence plan won’t generate positive results.
- You Should Test And Optimize
It is the most crucial part of sales cadence that entirely depends on many unique factors. After setting up the sales cadence, the next step is to verify that it works for you by getting the results you want. If you find that the prospect doesn’t open your email, make the subject of your email more compelling. If the click and response rates are not what you expected, consider making your content more informative.
Propel Guru’s Mantra For Building Effective Sales Prospecting Cadence
1. It is assumed that the best days for cold calling and setting up meetings are on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But at Propel Guru, we schedule our sales meetings and appointments on Mondays and Fridays and have been proven to achieve great results.
2. The best times for cold calling are from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm and from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm. Cold calling depends on what your prospect is and where they are from. If your prospect is a high- and mid-level manager, they’re usually available in the morning. However, if your prospect is an employee, they will likely be available in the second half of the day.
3. You can set up three points of contact per day. For example, if your contact calls and your prospect doesn’t pick up the phone, you can leave a voicemail and send an email.
4. If you get a “no” from the prospect, try to understand the reason for the rejection. Knowing the reason for the lost opportunity will help you identify the roadblocks and improve your product/service.
How To Measure And Track The Results
Once you have a sales cadence in place, you need to know whether it is profitable for your business. To determine the success of your sales cadence, you need to track the following four metrics:
1. Email open and click-through rate: If your mail has been opened, then you’ve nailed the subject line and caught the prospect’s attention. If they click on the link you shared, it means your email’s content has attracted your prospect enough to take action.
2. Email open to reply ratio: A high reply rate indicates that the email’s content matches the prospect’s needs and pain points.
3. Call to appointment ratio: By tracking the number of calls that resulted in an appointment, you will know if you target your ideal profile.
4. Bounce rate: High bounce rates indicate that it is time to cut down your email list.
Summary
Building a super-effective sales cadence enables you to reach many contacts across multiple accounts in a repeatable, efficient, varied way. A sales cadence is a timeline of sales activities and methods reps use to engage leads. Sales cadence makes things easy to monitor and measure, simplifying the management and optimization of the sales process and ensuring consistency by providing specific procedures for reps to follow.
Are you looking to hire the best Lead generation services providers for managing campaigns and acquiring and evaluating new leads? Propel Guru specializes in lead generation marketing to bring vast traffic and generate genuine leads for your business optimization.
Indrajeet Agrawal
Head of Business Development & Consultant
A successful sales leader, Indrajeet has effortlessly led teams to successful deliveries by redefining business promotion, lead generation, email marketing, and a series of out-of-the-box sales and marketing techniques. Ability to work independently and with cross-functional teams and facilitating truly agile processes while seeking iterative improvement.
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