In this blog, we will go though:
- What Are Sales Cadences?
- Why Planning Touch Points Ahead of Time Matters
- The Core Structure of a Cadence
- Automation vs Personalization in Sales Sequences
- The Real Goal of a Cadence
- The Complete Sales Cadence Strategy for Modern Outbound Teams
- Final Takeaway
- FAQs about Sales Sequences or Sales Cadences
What Are Sales Cadences?
Sales cadences or sequences are a series of touch points that you plan ahead of time to engage with your buyers or your prospects, so whether you’re trying to engage with somebody who comes inbound and shows interest, or maybe it’s completely cold outbound. Whatever the goal of the cadence actually is, you’re planning those touch points along the way—what channel you’re going to reach out to them on, what the message looks like, how many days in between your touch points are you going to wait before you reach back out—so all of those components make up a cadence.
Explore more About: What Is Outbound Sales? Strategy, Process, and How to Generate Qualified Meetings
Why Planning Touch Points Ahead of Time Matters
Anybody in a sales role knows that when you reach out to someone, usually it’s not the first or last time you’re going to contact that person. Usually it takes a couple times, whether it’s multiple phone calls or multiple emails. So planning out your touch points ahead of time is really going to make that conversation and make that relationship more strategic and less work on you as a rep, because you already have it planned out. You’ve got a game plan, you know what the touch points are going to be, you know that when you reach out it paints a nice story, because you’ve already planned them ahead of time.
The Core Structure of a Cadence
The core structure of sales sequence or sales cadence consist of steps that you’re going to use across particular channels. That might be 30 touches across LinkedIn, email, and phone.
On the first day, a cadence might include sending an email, not asking for a meeting in the email, connecting with them on LinkedIn, doing a bit of research based on LinkedIn, and then trying to call them.
Typically, people don’t pick up their phone nowadays on the first try, so you have to try again two days later. You have to follow these steps after every two days, and you can use sales engagement platforms to track that.
Automation vs Personalization in Sales Sequences
A cadence is a mixture of automation and personalization. Certain things can be automated and certain things should be personalized. One tactic is sending polls, either on LinkedIn or by email, such as asking a VP of sales what their top outbound sales challenge is right now. That can be automated. Then, if they respond with something like relevant messaging, a personalized message can follow that is relevant to that challenge.
Certain parts can be automated, and in other parts a more personalized approach is recommended. One approach is to automate emails and then do a more personalized approach on LinkedIn and calling. Another is to have four automated emails and four personalized emails. It depends on the resources, talent, and research you have internally.
The Real Goal of a Cadence
The ultimate goal is revenue, to close deals. But essentially what you’re doing with a cadence is almost like nurturing someone into a conversation. Typically, at least the first two touches on LinkedIn and email never ask for a meeting. It’s the whole give-before-you-take approach.
If a company is hiring SDRs, for example, an email might say: “Hey, I noticed you’re hiring SDRs at your company. Would you mind looking at a list of interview questions that may be helpful in the hiring process?” That gives them something relevant and warms them up.
The goal is to get a qualified meeting, to have a conversation with that person on the phone to discuss what you do, and then from there the goal is to actually close a deal. The main goal of a cadence is to get someone on a Zoom call where you can discuss further information with them.
The Complete Sales Cadence Strategy for Modern Outbound Teams
The modern sales cadence strategy is a structured, multi-channel approach to engage prospects with consistent, personalized touchpoints that drive conversions. Let’s see how the overall strategy looks like!
Start With Buyer Pain, Not Your Product
Everything starts with the pains of your buyer persona or your ideal customer profile. So many people are still product pitching. In those opening LinkedIn or email messages, think about the pains that your ideal customer profile is going through and align with marketing. Think about pieces of content that are giving them advice that can help with those challenges. If a company is hiring SDRs, for example, a useful piece of content could be about what to look for in an SDR, because some people say you should hire someone experienced and some say it should be someone green who you can nurture.
Build Targeted Lists Based on Buyer Profiles
Another very important part is the data. The data is actually the people that you’re targeting, and that’s normally where campaigns go wrong. Automation can work very well, but only if you segregate your lists into different buyer profiles. You can do that by job title. For example, if you’re selling something and typically sell to a head of marketing, a head of sales, or a CEO of a small company, they’ve all got different challenges, so you separate those. You also separate via industry.
A good idea is to target industries where you’ve got case studies that can get their attention. Then there are triggers. A trigger could be hiring SDRs, hiring another position that’s relevant to your ideal customer profile, using particular software that you integrate with, companies going through a merger and acquisition, or companies launching a product. These are all things you can build lists around using different vendors, and then you can send automated emails that seem personalized even though they aren’t, because you’ve used these triggers.
Tools like Apollo, ZoomInfo, and Cognism can help uncover trigger events. You can literally find lists of companies who are hiring SDRs, rounds of funding, and other signals. These are all things you can use so that your messaging can be based on triggers, and you don’t have to do an insane amount of research manually.
Structure Your Cold Outreach and Calls to Action
For the first email before asking for a meeting, it helps to keep things super short. One sentence about the pain, such as “Typically a VP of sales has this pain,” followed by “Here’s a piece of content that I think can help you solve it,” works well. Or, if there’s a trigger, “This has happened at your company, here’s a piece of relevant content.”
In a personalized approach, you can add one line of personalization. Go on their LinkedIn, add one line of personalization, and keep it concise. You don’t want huge paragraphs.
There are so many channels nowadays, and it’s harder and harder to get people’s attention. People in bigger companies must literally be getting thousands of prospecting emails. You can still get their attention, but the messaging has got to be super sharp and hit their pain straight away.
For a completely cold lead, where their email server hasn’t recognized your email address, it’s best practice not to include links in the first email. A typical approach is to say, “Here’s a pain you may face. We’ve got a piece of content. Would you be interested in seeing it?” Then they may reply yes, and that reply often includes their phone number, which gives you the opportunity to call them and have a conversation.
Another approach is to simply give a piece of content first and ask for the meeting further down the line. As the cadence progresses, and because the goal is to get sales qualified leads, it becomes more appropriate to talk about case studies, still focusing on their challenges, not your products. For example: “We helped another company in this industry solve a challenge that you may be going through. Would you like to explore more about how we can help you?”
A useful point on calls to action is that asking something like “Are you interested in exploring more?” rather than “Would you like to have a five-minute call?” can increase reply rate quite a lot.
Execute a Multi-Channel Outreach Strategy (Email → LinkedIn → Call)
After the email, the next step is normally a LinkedIn request. For the LinkedIn message, either say nothing at all or send literally one line. If you send a really long message in a LinkedIn request, people instantly think you’re trying to sell them something. A simple line like “I love your podcast” is often enough, because people put out content because they want you to listen to it. From there, pairing LinkedIn with a phone call works well. Once you’ve looked at their profile, you can use nuggets from it in the call. That makes the outreach highly personalized rather than a generic pitch.
Use the Phone to Qualify, Warm Up, and Convert
The phone is an interactive channel, so it is good to get a meeting on that call. The first goal is to identify their pain that you can help with. The call is about qualifying and probing. A qualifying question might be: “I noticed on Indeed you’re hiring SDRs, is that correct?” If they say yes, then you can probe further: “How successful are your SDRs at the moment?” or “What types of playbooks do you have in place?” If everything is perfect, then there’s no need to pitch.
But if they start telling you they’ve got pains when it comes to outbound, then you start having a conversation and try to get them on the next meeting. That’s why the phone is still so powerful for outbound. Even though the connect rate can be as low as two percent and you may have to call someone 30 times just for them to pick up once, people still do it because you can have a much more interactive conversation than you can in a LinkedIn message or an email.
If you do your research, the call becomes warmer. If you go on LinkedIn and find out relevant things about the prospect or see that they are clicking your email content or opening your email multiple times, it makes that conversation a lot warmer potentially. Everything is connected. If they are interacting a lot on LinkedIn and email, the phone becomes the best channel to actually get a meeting.
Use a High-Touch Cadence to Maximize Results
A 30-touch cadence may include 10 to 15 calls, six to eight emails, and six to eight LinkedIn messages. There is background behind that. Accounts doing 20 to 30 touches versus 10 to 20 touches were a lot more successful. Some people even got meetings on the 45th touch.
The science behind it is that a connection rate for a cold call is, on average, about four percent, which means you need to call someone over 20 times to get them to pick up once. That is why you need 10 to 15 calls, and sometimes even 20 calls. Double dialing is also recommended. You call someone once, and if they don’t answer, you call them again. The logic is simple: people miss calls all the time, especially from numbers they don’t recognize.
Sales engagement vendors also advise clients to do more touches because the teams doing six touches versus three touches are getting more meetings. Even though the messaging has to be right, it is also numbers, because six different emails give you six different opportunities to connect with someone or six different subject lines to get them to open, versus just three. It expands the opportunity to nurture.
Timing is a huge part of this. Sales is a balance between quality and quantity, personalization and automation. Even though messaging needs to be really good, if you go after a bigger group of people, it is going to be the right time for some of them. By the end of the cadence, maybe they are warmed up. Even after someone goes through the 30 touches, they can be put into a marketing nurturing sequence and then contacted again three months later. Everything is timing.
Even a really bad sales email may resonate with a tiny part of the audience who happen to have the need at that time. The only thing worse than sending a really bad sales email is sending nothing at all. You always have to start somewhere, and when you start, you get feedback. Improvement comes from that process.
Move Prospects Down the Funnel Strategically
In the middle of the cadence, the messaging becomes more of a pitch. As you go through the email sequence, you’re moving further down the funnel. That’s where case studies become useful, but they must be relevant to their industry or job title. For example: “I helped another sales leader in the cybersecurity SaaS space with their SDR team book four times more meetings than they were before. Would you like to see if we can replicate the results for your company?” It is still very relevant messaging, but more bottom of the funnel. This is what can be done, this is the benefit, and this is how their challenge can be solved within their industry.
Content can still be used in the middle of the cadence as well. For example, citing a metric such as, “it takes three months on average to ramp up an SDR team” can be used to ask, “How long does it take at your company?” That gets them thinking. Then, when you call them, you can have a conversation about it.
The whole idea is to propose questions, get them thinking, and by the time you present the case study and ask for a meeting, they are often much more open to it because they feel like you can actually help them rather than just being another salesperson.
The aim is to get them thinking and challenge what their current process is. There are two types of leads: the person who already has the need at that time, and the person who almost doesn’t know they have a challenge. The cadence helps make them aware of the challenge, and when they realize it, you become the person who helped them realize it.
Final Takeaway
A major misconception is that if you are doing 30 touches, you are essentially just spamming people, and that you should not automate everything. Of course, a three-touch super personalized email cadence can work, but timing matters too. If you can add more content that is super relevant and keep it super relevant, that is fine. The problem is not automation itself. The problem is terrible automation. If you put a lot of effort into your data, triggers, and industries, your message can seem personalized even if it is actually automated.
FAQs about Sales Sequence or Sales Cadence
1. What mindset should you have when writing sales outreach?
The mindset that you want to cultivate is a customer-centric mindset so put yourself in the shoes of who’s going to receive this.
2. What is the correct personalization path?
Start with the person, if you can’t find anything specific check out the company if not what’s happening overall as an industry.
3. What should you do when a prospect says it’s not the right time?
We must respect their answer and say, “Sure, I get it. Is there a better time to reach back out?” You can create a sort of nurture cadence.
4. How should you write emails to make them more effective?
When you’re writing an email, try and change any of the “I” conversation to the “You” conversation because people want to understand what’s in it for them.
5. What is the difference between inbound and outbound cadence timing?
With inbound, we have a few more touch points within day one, day two, and day three, whereas with cold outbound, we spread them out a little bit more.
