RELATED: Four Laws To Build A Sales Cadence

In this article:

1. The Art of Creating a Sales Cadence
2. The Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence
3. How to Start Your Sales Cadence Strategy
4. What Winning Sales Reps Do to Double Their Contact Rates
5. How to Build Sales Cadence That Actually Works
6. What’s a Sales Cadence?

Cadence Definition | What Is Sales Cadence and What You Need to Know About It

Cadence Definition: Although cadence may seem music-related, in sales, it refers to a workflow reps follow during prospecting.

1. The Art of Creating a Sales Cadence

How do you start when you are trying to reach a prospect?

Should you call, should you email, or leave a voicemail? How many times and what time of the day?

Every sales representative executes a ‘cadence’ when they reach out via email, phone, or using social media. The cadence helps to initiate a conversation with a potential prospect.

On that note, without knowing what the best practices are, sales reps are at risk of failing the sales cadence test.

If you want to find out how you can improve your sales cadence, you need to find a way to measure it first. ZANT provides a nifty test in the article linked below that will help you find out how your sales cadence measures up against others.

Before you can start testing out a new sales cadence, you need to find out what works and what doesn’t first. You can also take the assessment found in the article linked above to find out how you’re doing.

Click to read How Good Is Your Sales Cadence? Take the Test!

2. The Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence

When sales reps reach out to prospects via email, phone, or using social media, they execute what is called a sales cadence. That is if they simply don’t give up after one phone call or email.

Research shows you have a higher chance of contacting leads when you are persistent in your outreach. However, the data also shows that increasingly, sales reps give up too soon on leads.

A sales cadence helps you get into the cycle of constant contact with your prospect. By having a set of next movements set up, you prepare yourself to get into the groove of not giving up after one contact with a lead.

Click to read A Guide to Build a Winning Sales Cadence.

3. How to Start Your Sales Cadence Strategy

There are an art and a science to building a sales cadence, and only a blending of both will allow you to get through to the best prospects.

When executed correctly, a sales cadence can nearly double your contact rates. It is the path that sales professionals follow to success.

Of course, you should always optimize this winning sales cadence piece-by-piece. Base your information off of data so you aren’t just changing it without rhyme or reason.

ZANT has created the ultimate guide to building a winning sales cadence – and we’re giving it away for free. Use this guide as a starting point.

Click to read How to Build a Sales Cadence to Rule Them All.

RELATED: The Sales Cadence Tool You Need To Generate More Leads

4. What Winning Sales Reps Do to Double Their Contact Rates

Prospecting is grueling work, and most sales reps fail due to lack of trying. Data from ZANT Labs shows that the most utilized sales cadence is one single email when trying to contact leads.

It’s an appalling number, given that most prospects need around six touches to respond.

We’ve teamed up with Michael Pedone, CEO of SalesBuzz, to see what makes a winning sales cadence and a great sales conversation.

A winning sales cadence involves more than the number of times a sales rep contacts a prospect. It also includes how long intervals between contacts are, the length of these contacts, and more.

Once you know more about what makes a triumphant sales cadence, try and incorporate these elements in yours. See for yourself if it works for you or not.

Click to read Sales Prospecting For the Pros: 5 Secrets to Build a Winning Cadence.

5. How to Build Sales Cadence That Actually Works

Building sales cadence is crucial because it helps you get your prospects to move faster down the sales funnel. At the same time, you’re bettering and optimizing your sales activities to get the most results with the least effort.

Sales cadence shouldn’t be rocket science — it should be in the arsenal of every decent, hard-working sales rep. This should be the case even if it’s to spite Marketing that you upheld your part.

In this post, I’ll give you all the elements you need to design your own triumphant sales cadence.

In this article, you can find out more about what each element of this sales cadence structure means. When building your sales cadence from the ground up, make sure that you consider these core elements.

Click to read The 5 Step Process to Building a Sales Cadence That Works.

6. What’s a Sales Cadence?

If you’re working in sales as a representative, manager, or even a sales leadership position, you’ve probably heard sales cadence before. If you haven’t – don’t worry about it.

Besides, you’re probably doing it every day without giving it a second thought.

At ZANT, we’ve perfected the art of building and executing sales cadences and established best practices in the field. We know precisely when you should contact your prospects, how long to persist in your attempts, and which communication media you should use.

Having the right sales cadence ensures things will run smoothly and efficiently. Actually, a cadence is a key concept anyone in a sales leadership position should utilize.

Click to read 26 Things a Sales Cadence Tool Should Do For You.

We hope this article has helped you get a basic understanding of what sales cadence is. Aside from that, we wish you’ve learned more about how it can benefit your organization.

Remember to check out the cadence resources we’ve provided to help you get to know and define cadence better, and ultimately improve your prospecting and overall results.

Want to know more about sales cadence? Ask your questions in the comments section below!

Up Next:

• Top 3 Things You Need to Perfect Your Sales Cadence
• How To Build The Ultimate Outbound Sales Cadence
• How Capturing One Unique Aspect Can Help Maintain Better Client Relations

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on December 7, 2018, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

Find out the four elements you need to consider and master to have a successful sales cadence. Keep reading to find out more.

RELATED: The 5 Step Process to Building a Sales Cadence That Works

In this article:

1. What Is a Sales Cadence: The Problem with Defining Sales Cadence
2. The XANT Sales Cadence Research
3. The XANT Research Study Results
4. Laws to Follow in Building a Sales Cadence
   1. First Law of the Sales Cadence: Attempts
   2. Second Law of the Sales Cadence: Media
   3. Third Law of the Sales Cadence: Duration
   4. Fourth Law of the Sales Cadence: Spacing
   5. Fifth Law of the Sales Cadence: Content

The Sales Cadence Best Practices

Sales Cadence Definition: This refers to the sequence or frequency with which someone like a sales leader meets with the sales team or with individual members. This also refers to the sequence of activities that aim to increase contact and qualification. The main purpose of the sales cadence is to monitor progress.

What Is a Sales Cadence: The Problem with Defining Sales Cadence

I believe there are multiple pillars you need to master to have a great prospecting strategy. Today, I’ll share the four laws of building sales cadence.

This is a topic I discussed with Bob Perkins for a webinar with the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals. Perkins is the Founder of AA-ISP.

We debated the definition and context of “sales cadence.” Some refer to the cadence as a sequence.

There are also others who call it “sales engagement,” “sales play,” or “sales follow-up strategy.” One of the problems we see in the market is we can’t really define what sales cadence and all these other terms are.

This is an interesting debate because a lot of the definitions we have for these come from our gut. We don’t really base them on data.

The XANT Sales Cadence Research

That is why we at XANT decided to conduct research on sales cadence. For this study, we took two steps.

1. First, we reached out to 1,400 companies and asked them how they believe they conduct their sales cadence process. We wanted to get opinion data, so we asked them things like the number of touches their sales reps do.
2. Second, we visited our big data set and looked at what people were actually doing. XANT has the world’s largest database which captures literally billions of sales interactions.

Phone calls made, emails sent, changes in lead status, opportunities — we capture all those through our AI engine.

We looked at three perspectives during the study:

• What people believe they are doing
• What they are actually doing
• The optimal data that will yield the best results

The XANT Research Study Results

Reviewing study results to learn sales cadence

The results we got from this study were very interesting. Let me share with you what our team of data scientists told me — mind you, they’re not experts in sales.

The first thing they pinpointed is defining sales cadence. We have to start there.

When you talk about a cadence, you’re referring to a sequence of activities to increase contact and qualification. What we’re focusing on here is trying to get better conversations.

If you do this right, you can qualify people better.

When our data scientists delved further into the data, they were able to break down, or sequence, the DNA of a sales cadence. These are the four laws in building a sales cadence which we will be discussing, and we’ll also cover the fifth law.

Laws to Follow in Building a Sales Cadence

Looking at the data we’ve gathered, we discovered that, if you want to build a cadence, you need to have these five elements:

1. Attempts — The total number of touches in a cadence or a sequence
2. Media — The pattern you use and the different types of media you use to reach out to prospects (e.g. phone, voice mail, email, etc.)
3. Duration — Refers to the length of time from your first touch to your last touch
4. Spacing — The time between activities
5. Content — The message you say in your communication

That was how our data scientists broke down the DNA of a cadence. Then we decided to go into each one of these four elements, or laws.

In our study, we aimed to know what people believe they do versus what they are actually doing. We also sought the best practices that will yield the best sales cadence results.

An important thing to remember is there is no one-size-fits-all cadence. We didn’t see this in the data we’ve gathered in our research.

Another thing we’ve noticed is outbound cadences are completely different from inbound cadences. Going cold to somebody who’s never heard of your company is a completely different cadence compared to following up on a marketing-generated lead.

All of the data I’m going to share with you today focuses on outbound. They are also primarily B2B sales data.

First Law of the Sales Cadence: Attempts

As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be looking at three perspectives as we discuss the laws in building a sales cadence. Based on our research, sales reps believe that the number of attempts they make per contact is 15.1.

This is fascinating because when you look up the optimal number of attempts in a cadence, the Internet will also give you around 15. This is because it’s what people believe they are doing.

We even broke down the 15 attempts into the different forms they take:

• 4.7 phone calls
• 2.9 voice messages
• 0.7 SMS
• 4.6 emails
• 2 social touches

Yet the real question is, what are sales reps actually doing? We’ve looked at a million data points, so what we’ve found is the average.

Know that by industry and company size, the number can be slightly different. Also, this is outbound-based data, and not inbound.

The actual number of attempts that sales reps make per contact is 3.5. Now, what is the optimal number of attempts?

This was surprising to me, but the optimal is 7 attempts. We saw a big drop in contact rate when you go past 7 attempts in an outbound cadence.

Also, although 7 is the optimal number, this is true only in a specific time frame. What we found in the data is that there are companies that practice “recycling.”

They will run a cadence of 7 attempts for a certain time frame, then they’ll let that sit dormant for a certain time. Afterward, they’ll recycle that and hit them 7 times again.

That recycle time differs between companies, but know that you can run a play, attack them 7 times, and then come back. Run a different play later 7 times.

If you have a target account, you “never” stop going after it. That’s why you recycle.

RELATED: Cadence Definition: What a Salesperson Should Know

Second Law of the Sales Cadence: Media

Using various media types to build sales cadence

Next is media, which refers to the types of communication you use in a cadence.

How many communication methods can a sales rep use in a prospecting cadence? We’re talking about inbound or outbound here.

We asked this question to sales reps, and they responded with 7. The communication methods they mentioned were phone, voice mail, text, chat, email, social, and direct mailer.

There was a big debate on video — a lot of people we surveyed said they believe that video is part of email. It’s true that it is generally a part of a different channel, so you can’t use it by itself.

The point is, there are many different types of communication methods. Don’t box yourself within email or phone, because there’s a lot out there that you can utilize.

One of the things we found interesting was, only 10.4% of sales reps and teams use video and email. To me, that screams opportunity!

Another underutilized communication method is direct mailer. We surveyed 500 executives from different industries and asked them which type of communication method they’ll respond to best.

Direct mail actually came on top, yet there’s a low percentage of salespeople using that. This is another opportunity to explore on an underutilized communication method.

Now when we looked into the data, we discovered that salespeople are predominantly using only two communication methods.

The optimal number is three or even more. Your contact rate will increase four times if you don’t limit your communication methods.

Expand your horizon — that’s the best advice you can follow when it comes to media. Remember that anything you initiate that causes somebody to learn about you is already considered an attempt, or touch.

Third Law of the Sales Cadence: Duration

Duration is often less thought about, compared to attempts and media. We asked our survey participants how long they think the typical cadence of a sales rep lasts.

That’s from the first touch down to the last touch. The average duration our survey participants came up with was about a month.

We’re referring to the total days in a month, not only the business days. Based on the data we gathered, the actual practice is around 20 to 25 days.

The other question we posed was, how long should your outbound cadences be? Survey said, up to 8 days.

Now, should you do your 7 attempts in 30 days? I say go after them, and fairly hard too.

Hit them in around two weeks. If you break that into business days, you’re hitting about a week and a half.

Hit them multiple times, rest them for a little while, and then pick it up again and run another program. The optimal practice is 7 touches within a week and a half.

It’s good to note as well that if you’re going after different personas, the numbers we’re presenting will change. This is also something we noticed in our research data.

Fourth Law of the Sales Cadence: Spacing

Spacing refers to the time between activities.

What is the optimal spacing of a sales cadence? Our survey participants said up to two days, which is what most people believe when it comes to spacing.

In reality, people in general wait about a good full week when it comes to their cadences. A lot of people run cadences that last around 60 to 90 days. They’re doing about 15 to 20 touches across those 40 to 60 days.

Yet optimal-wise, having a short spacing is better. One thing we learned from the study is to hit prospects short. Try to educate them on who you are and then back off.

The optimal spacing on the recycling period based on the data we gathered is anywhere between 2 weeks to 45 days. That’s also the range that we typically saw people practice.

Remember that you don’t want to just hit your prospects 7 times and then leave them. You’ll want to recycle by starting a new sales cadence.

Fifth Law of the Sales Cadence: Content

Using quality content to build sales cadence

As promised, we will also cover the fifth law in building a sales cadence. As we delved into content, here are the things we’ve found:

• Voice Messages — This communication method is not dead. Yet the shorter the voice message is, the better. Try to keep it under 30 seconds.
• Video — Don’t neglect this communication method. You also need to keep this short, so really think about what you will say in your 60-second video-based email.
• Direct Mail — Executives love receiving this. There are different types of direct mail like branded and general gifts, handwritten notes, and gift cards. The most effective one is the handwritten note.

It’s still best to contact prospects at the beginning and end of the day during the middle of the week (Wednesdays and Thursdays).

As you prepare your sales cadence, remember the five laws you ought to build it on. Now that you know these, there is no excuse to keep on taking actions based on guesswork.

Instead, start following the optimal prospecting cadence to get the best results.

What practices would you like to improve on your own sales cadence? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Up Next:

• The Sales Cadence Tool You Need to Generate More Leads
• 26 Things a Sales Cadence Tool Should Do for You
• Sales Best Practices Every Sales Professional Should Know

In this article:

1. Generating Inbound Leads
2. Why Do You Need To Build a Sales Cadence?
3. The Foundational Elements of a Sales Cadence
4. What Is Sales Cadence?
5. The 5-Step Process to Build a Sales Cadence
6. Executing a Sales Cadence Flawlessly
7. Compare Your Sales Cadence To That of Fortune 500 Companies

How to Build Sales Cadence That Actually Works

Generating Inbound Leads

There’s a lot to be said about the effectiveness of inbound marketing, and while not all marketing leads are created equal, there’s value in these efforts nonetheless. A Hubspot report shows that Marketing departments produce hundreds to thousands of leads per month (the number will vary by industry). As a sales rep, how do you stay on track with the right sales activities and following up with the right leads, every day of the week? It all starts with a well-thought-out sales cadence.

When implemented correctly, a sales cadence can nearly double your contact rates, show internal experiments from XANT (preliminary data from soon to be published research, if you will. Just know I’m not making this up).

Why Do You Need To Build a Sales Cadence?

Salespeople and sales managers have been selling for years, and many of them don’t give much thought to sales cadence. So, why do you need one? The sales cadence is the sequence of sales activities or a series of activities a sales rep initiates to try and establish contact with a prospect or make a sale with potential clients.

There are two main purposes for having a sales cadence:

1. To make sure leads are not falling through the cracks while your team is working in the CRM
2. To make sure deals are progressing by moving leads to the next stages in the funnel

Your sales cadence can also optimize your sales team activities and nearly double their contact rates. But for this, it needs to be customized to your ideal buyers (target audience) and to your product and/or industry.

The Foundational Elements of a Sales Cadence

The foundational structure for a cadence — let’s call it a ‘classic cadence’– is placing 3 phone calls, leaving 3 voicemails, sending 3 emails, and performing 3 social interactions. XANT research has shown that this cadence can produce optimal results, even if you don’t have enough time and resources to refine it and think of a better sales and marketing strategy.

It’s a tried and tested sales cadence, and if you’re just starting out to build out a working sales process, this should be your first step.

When deciding the structure of a cadence you need to review five elements: sequence, attempts, duration, spacing, media, and messaging. Your sales cadence should answer questions for the sales team, like:

• How do I start to engage my prospects?
• How long should I attempt to contact them, before giving up?
• Over the course of how many days should I time my efforts?
• How many days should be in between my sales touches?
• Should I email, call or leave a voicemail?
• What should I say, when I get someone to respond?

What Is Sales Cadence?

A sales cadence is a complex strategy which molds to your target audience needs and can encompass all or some of six communication media: phone, voicemail, text message, social media, email, and direct mailing.

The 5-Step Process to Build a Sales Cadence

So, how do you start to build a proper sales cadence that works to get you opportunities and ultimately closed deals?

Building the Structure of a Sales Cadence

When deciding the structure of a cadence you need to review the six basics and compare them to industry benchmarks. Are doing more or less calls than what the industry is doing? Are your touches spaced out properly for your leads to have time to breathe, without losing top of mind?

XANT Labs research analyzed 14,000+ cadences, made up of 144,000+ total activities, across nearly 9,000 companies and established these five critical components for a successful cadence.

Step 1: Analyze the Attempts

This is the total number of touches in a sequence. In one TOPO study, sales development reps were asked how many total touches they performed on a lead or contact, they reported 15.4 touches across all communication methods.

However, XANT’s study analyzed over 8,000 companies to see what SDR’s really did with their time, the typical lead had only 4.05 touches.

Clearly, sales reps are over-estimating their own activity.

According to an HBR study, you should make a minimum of 6 calls to try and get in touch with leads, and the ideal cadence has between 10 and 15 touches.

Step 2: Figure Out Which Types of Media to Use

Should I call, should I write an email, or leave a voicemail? How about all of them? A healthy sales cadence should use all communication media at your disposal. If you can find out if your clients prefer to email or a phone call — even better, use that to your advantage.

With transactional sales, short sales cycles and small deal sizes, you can use more aggressive mediums such as the phone. If you are a relational sales rep with longer sales cycles and larger deal sizes, you can start with email or social and follow with more aggressive communication like the phone.

Looking for more info on sales cadences? Register for our webinar!

Step 3: Determine the Ideal Duration

Duration is the length of a sales sequence from first touch to last. Again, there is a disconnect between reality and what people think they are doing. Sales development reps think their average duration is around 29.3 days, when it is in fact around 4.8 days.

Research shows that best practice for duration is two to four weeks.

Yep, you read it right. You can’t give up before the two weeks mark, or you will miss out on opportunities.

For relational or account-based reps, best practice indicates those should be executed over a longer time frame depending on the strategy of the initiative. For a transactional or high-velocity rep, the cadence should be shorter, closer to the two business week period.

Step 4: Figure Out the Appropriate Spacing Between Your Activities

How should you space your activities to make sure your prospects get some time to breathe, read your content, or think about your proposal? Most reps will have spacing between 1 and 4 days, with sales reps in the transactional model focusing on shorter time between activities.

Tip: It’s a good idea to keep your spacing consistent for simplicity.

Step 5: Craft Content That Will Speak to Your Customer

What do you say, when you finally get someone on the phone? Do you start off by asking questions about their business, or do you immediately proceed to your sales pitch? Often, the type of business you’re in and the characteristics of your target audience will decide what your message is about.

Research has shown that the typical length of an email is 362 words, and nearly half of voicemails left were over 30 seconds. As always, take industry benchmarks with a pinch of salt. Just because they are doing this, it doesn’t mean that it works.

A Boomerang study in 2016 put the ideal length of an email at 50 to 125 words.

Remember, your content will only work if it speaks to the pain points of your customer. Always, always start with your customer and know your personas.

Executing a Sales Cadence Flawlessly

Finally, planning is important, but execution will eventually determine how successful your sales cadence is. Derek Boggs, Marketing Automation Manager at XANT, has executed over 900 Account-Based Sales campaigns. He shares his tips for a killer sales cadence:

“A successful sales cadence requires two things. First, it requires timely follow up to a recent engagement or trigger. You need to respond to a need or a shared experience that recently happened. Whether it is a direct mail piece landing on their desk, they clicked on a link in an email, or they just got promoted at their company — it is important that your next message references that trigger and is timely to that event,” said Derek.

“Second, your messaging should be consistent to the event that triggered the sales sequence and that the offer is the same throughout the execution. For example, if you send a coffee mug through the mail with the offer of getting a demo and see how you can keep your pipeline ‘hot and full’, your emails and phone calls should reference your coffee mug,” adds Derek.

Compare Your Sales Cadence To That of Fortune 500 Companies

What is your sales team doing to get in touch with prospective clients and create more opportunities? You can compare your business sales cadence with what of Fortune 500 companies, with the XANT Sales Cadence Audit.

This is a simple 3-minute survey which allows our research analysts to look at your cadence and compare it to industry benchmarks– and give you detailed information about where you rock and where you can do better.

How good is your Cadence? Dare to take the test?

A successful sales cadence doesn’t happen overnight, but with the right elements and proper execution, it can definitely improve the performance of your sales team. From opening up opportunities to increasing closed deals, a well-designed sales cadence can definitely bring many benefits to your team.

What are your thoughts in building a good sales cadence that works? Share it with us in the comments section below.

Up Next: Why Sales Reps Spend So Little Time Selling

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on February 8, 2018, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

What Winning Sales Reps Do to Double Their Contact Rates

Successful sales representatives create a sales cadence with multiple touch points, including a variety of sales communication channels: calls, texts, email, social media, voicemail, event direct mail and video.

At XANT, we’ve tracked and analyzed thousands of sales interactions with machine learning algorithms and found there really is a formula for success. When executed correctly, the right sales cadence can double your contact rates.

There’s an ideal duration, spacing, attempts, media, and messaging for each sales cadence during prospecting, and we’re about to tell you what it is.

Register for the Webinar with Gabe and Michael Pedone

Gabe Larsen, VP of Growth for XANT, and Michael Pedone, founder and CEO of SalesBuzz, are going to show you the winning formula for sales prospecting.

About Gabe Larsen:

Gabe Larsen is an international sales consultant with over 15 years experience. He is Vice President of XANT Labs, the research and best practice arm of XANT. The Labs unit works to uncover insights in the sales industry which help sales reps close more and bigger deals, faster, and using machine learning technology in the process.

https://labs.www.insidesales.com/

About Michael Pedone:

Michael Pedone is a world-class sales training mentor, coach and marketing expert. Michael has helped hundreds of companies across the globe improve their sales just by using his no-nonsense phone sales techniques. Anyone can learn his sales training method and put his techniques into practice quickly.

He helps sales reps feel excited about their work again and become more motivated and productive. And the companies they work for rake in more leads, conversions and profits.

To learn more about our sales training programs, visit: www.salesbuzz.com.

Join the XANT Webinar to Learn:

• How to connect with the right leads, at the right time — and what to say to convert them
• The 5 pillars of prospecting, and best practices to succeed
• How smart sales technology can help you become a prospecting machine

Recent research has shown that more often than not, sales reps give up too soon on trying to contact leads. The most common sales follow-up sequence used is one single email (used by 30 percent of sales reps), with the second most popular strategy as one single call and a voicemail.

Best Practices for Sales Follow-up

This contradicts best practices which show sales reps must make at least six attempts to maximize their chances of making contact.

Or, should they?

These practices for lead response management were established by a study created by Dr. James B. Oldroyd, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007.

And while there is still value in Dr. Oldroyd’s research (immediacy in response and persistence are key to sales performance), modern sales reps need more than this to be successful. We are in an era of customer empowerment, where the customer does his own research, is able to compare vendors and other customer reviews. Moreover, we are in an era where the customer decides where he spends his time and a 15-minute conversation is hard to achieve.

Personalization of your sales approach, as well as that of the messaging and follow-up strategy are going to be pivotal to a sales team’s success.

You can’t choose this randomly. You need to carefully plan it out and account for factors like:

• The sales model used (transactional vs. relational)
• Whether the team is doing lots of outbound calls or taking inbound leads
• How and when does the customer prefer to be contacted?

Once you figure out these key elements of your business, you can create a custom sales follow-up strategy to rule them all.

Create A Customized Sales Follow-up Strategy

The “Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence” by Gabe Larsen has all you need to create this strategy. This is an in-depth, powerful guide to structuring a sales cadence. To save you some time, we’ve created a mini-version of the most important facts you need to know before working on your follow-up strategy, summarized from the book.

This will answer five of the most important questions sales professionals have before contacting leads:

Contact Attempts: How many times should you try to contact a lead?

Communication Media: How many communication channels should you use?

Duration of a Cadence: How long should you keep contacting a prospect?

Spacing Between Attempts: How long should you wait between contact attempts?

Sales Content: What kind of content should you use?

All these answers will be customized based on your sales model and type of transaction. You can see the infographic below for the answers, or get the full eBook here.

  Get the eBook.

How to Start Your Sales Cadence Strategy

Wondering if you should call your prospects four or five times? Should you use email, voicemail or text, and what’s the best sequence of sales activities? How long should an email be, and what times are the best for calling prospects?

We’ve done our research and we have the answer to all your questions on sales cadence.

Building an ideal sales cadence will depend on a myriad of factors– like your product and services, your customer’s preference and the type of sales environment you’re in (transactional vs. relational).

The following are the five foundational elements of a cadence.

Attempts: The total number of touch points made

Sales reps self-report that they do around 15 touches for each lead. When we examined what reps actually did we found that, analyzing XANT’s big data, the typical inbound cadence has 4.05 attempts and the typical outbound cadence has 3 attempts. There is clearly a disconnect between what people say they do, versus what they actually do.

XANT new research shows exactly how many touches your cadence should have– based on the type of sales model you are using.

Media: The type of communication methods used

For inbound reps, the most popular communication media when reaching out to leads was a single email followed by a call with a voicemail. For outbound reps, the most common cadences was a single dial (26.5%). That doesn’t mean that is the optimal cadence.

Data shows that more communication media leads to higher response rates. How many channels should you use to reach leads? Watch our webinar to find out.

Duration: The time between the first and last attempt

1000+ companies reported the average duration for their sales cadence was 29.3 days. However, when we analyzed the XANT data set for inbound leads we found the actual duration was at 4.89 days. Only outbound cadences had a duration close to the perceived average (20.8 days).

Data shows the inbound and outbound cadences shouldn’t be so different. You can find the optimal duration in our guide to sales cadence.

When sales reps reach out to prospects via email, phone or using social media, they execute what is called a sales cadence… That is, if they simply don’t give up after one phone call or email. Research shows you have a higher chance of contacting leads when you are persistent in your outreach. However, the data also shows that increasingly, sales reps give up too soon on leads.

A Guide to Build a Winning Sales Cadence

Life is short so why not learn from the experts. Jake Reni, is a master when it comes to helping companies, including Adobe, think through a strategic go-to-market approach for building an optimizing sales and sales development teams. In this episode, Jake and I debate and discuss some of the trends and debates around what is need to get to a winning state for your sales teams.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Sales Development Summit
• State of Sales Report
• XANT Labs Best Practice Training

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

• How teams should be thinking about building segmentation and structure for their business
• What technology stack you should or shouldn’t be considering
• Is account-based sales for you or not

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Place one call too many, and you tick off your lead.

Give up too soon on someone, and you will turn up short on quota.

There is a growing body of research on sales cadence and how this should be executed for success.

And yet many sales reps today are still picking their sales cadence randomly, going with the communication method that is most convenient for them (email), or they simply go with their gut when contacting leads.

The Art of Creating a Sales Cadence

The art of creating a cadence is determined based on a myriad of factors, fueled primarily by sales reps’ intuition regarding the company and contact being pursued. But there’s still a few questions that need answering, and a sales cadence strategy does this for you:

• How many times should I attempt contact?
• How long should I wait between attempts?
• What methods are most likely to result in a conversation?
• What messaging will resonate with my potential buyer?
• When I should I give up?

Without having the answers to these questions, it’s useless to launch an outreach cadence, be it outbound or inbound.

When sales reps are winging it, important opportunities get missed.

Winning Sales Cadences Are Data-Driven

Using cold, hard, data, XANT research has shown the ideal number of touches for different sales models and business environments. Our free eBook, “The Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence,” will cover everything that’s included in building a cadence. It will show you how to use media, number of attempts, messaging, duration and spacing to WOW your prospects and nearly double your contact rates.

I encourage you to download this guide, read it at your own pace and then go ahead and implement best practices with sales cadence execution. I’m not going to bore you with details, but here’s just a few things you need to know about sales cadences:

• A sales cadence with more communication methods does better than single media touches
• For inbound leads, reps should have cadences that last up to ten days, while outbound target accounts can go up to 12 days
• Sales reps should space their contact attempts at two days for optimal results
• Shorter messages, both on email and voicemail, do better than long ones

There’s much more in the book on how to customize sales cadences– and how to evaluate them for optimizing.

The type of business you’re in, the product or service you are selling and the sales model (transactional vs. relational) are all going to influence how you build your sales cadence.

A Good Sales Cadence Can Double Contact Rates

I hope I’ve made you curious as to how a sales cadence works– and how you can optimize it for spectacular results. Our experiments have shown that when implemented correctly, a sales cadence can nearly double your contact rates.

And if you think you’ve already got a killer sales cadence– think again.

Sales reps are notoriously optimistic folk. There’s usually a huge disconnect between what sales reps think they do– and what they actually do.

TOPO data showed that reps report they do around 15 touches on average, per lead. When we looked at data showing real transactions, the number was closer to 4.05.

How Good Is Your Sales Cadence? Take the Test!

I dare you to take our sales cadence assessment and see how well you’re doing. Taking a sales cadence audit will only take 10 minutes and it will show you:

• How well built is your cadence based on all the five elements of a cadence structure
• How you compare next to other companies and sales professionals
• What you need to do to optimize your sales cadence and improve sales results

We know exactly when you should contact your prospects, how long to persist in your attempts, and which communication media you should use.

What’s a Sales Cadence?

Our definition of sales cadence is a sequence of sales activities that reps take to try and establish contact with their prospects. There’s a few things you should account for when creating your sales cadence: attempts, media, duration, spacing and content.

Basically, a sales cadence is your sales strategy that answers these questions:

• How many attempts do I make to contact a lead?
• Should I use a phone call, email, voicemail or other media?
• Over the course of how many days should I pace my sales efforts?
• How many days/or hours should be between my contact attempts?
• What is the message I should use with my prospects?

Common Sales Cadences Today

Unfortunately, sales reps today give little thought to how they time their contact attempts on trying to reach customers. They might do random sales cadences, or use email as a preferred method of communication because it’s more convenient, and less awkward than a phone call.

One TOPO study asked sales reps what they do to get in touch with their leads, and how soon do they give up.  They answered they do around 15 touches before giving up. But what they reported is far from the truth. When XANT analyzed over 8,000 companies in a comprehensive study, we found that number is closer to 4.05.

Four (4) touches. That’s pretty much all sales reps do, before giving up.

The study also found another concerning pattern. The most common outreach practices consisted of just one email, as a first method of contact. One (1) email. That’s it.

Now, as a Marketing professional, I might feel offended with these results– after all, I work hard to source leads. And if ever there’s a problem with reaching quota in any company, I anticipate some fingers will be pointing at me– “marketing leads are low quality.”

Right?

Why Are Sales Reps Failing at Their Sales Cadence?

But there’s no room for emotion in the world of data-driven sales and marketing. The truth is, a sales cadence is a complicated motion of events that a sales reps needs to keep track of. Sometimes they have over 100 sales activities per day. Here’s the full list of activities that a sales development representative does every day, in case you are curious (hint: it’s hard, grinding work).

The best sales cadences encompass around 12 touches for every lead. And no deal was ever closed when a sales rep gave up on a lead after less than 6 contact attempts.

The (Customer Relationship Management) CRM software is simply not equipped to handle the complexity of today’s sales world. The processes have changed, but the tool has not. 

In fact, the CRM was rated the most frustrating and inefficient sales system by sales rep, in a recent study on sales time management.

Reps waste a lot of time (around 10% of their day) just managing CRM-related tasks in spreadsheets. And only 35% of their day is spent on revenue-generating activities.

It’s unacceptable.

How A Sales Cadence Tool Can Help

Sales systems need to evolve and get more efficient, if we are to allow sales reps to have the complex sales sequences that today’s market needs. Each client is unique in preference for communication media. They have different times when they are more responsive, and respond to different messaging. 

Details, dates, appointments and updates get easily lost in CRM. Sales reps don’t have the ability to work efficiently and productively using just this platform.

Enter sales cadence tools.

A sales cadence platform can significantly boost productivity and efficiency for your sales team. When executed correctly, a sales cadence can nearly double your sales results (this is preliminary data from an XANT experiment with its own product, the Playbooks platform.

You can see our take on why Playbooks is the best tool on the market for salespeople here.

What a Sales Cadence Can (and Should) Do For You

My advice, if you’re looking for a sales cadence tool: don’t throw money at the problem, hoping it will go away.

A proper sales cadence tool is supposed to help sales representatives get to the right leads at the right time, with the right message consistently to help them reach their goals. It needs to integrate seamlessly into their workflow, and it needs to ultimately help them get and close more pipeline.

If experience in the B2B space has taught us anything, it’s that systems which are inefficient are not adopted. Especially by the Millennial workforce– they live and breathe technology on a daily basis.

Here’s our comprehensive list of what a sales cadence tool should do for you.

I call it the ultimate buyer’s guide for a sales cadence tool, and you can download it here.

Don’t go shopping for sales cadence software without it!