Everything to Know About the Sales Cadence

Do you ever feel like what you're doing to sell your product isn't producing the desired results?

You could be missing out on a crucial factor in the sales process -- the sales cadence!

A well-planned and executed sales cadence can provide structure, focus, and purpose to your GTM strategy.

Let's review everything startups and salespeople need to know about crafting an effective outreach sequence that stands out among competitors.

Read on!

A sales cadence is a structured and strategic approach sales representatives use to engage with potential customers and prospects.

It involves a well-planned sequence of activities and touchpoints, carefully designed to nurture leads, build relationships, and ultimately drive successful conversion rates.

By incorporating multiple sales channels, personalization, and valuable content, a sales cadence aims to optimize the effectiveness of the sales process and increase the chances of closing deals.

Focusing on frequency, timing, and lead follow-up ensures that sales teams stay organized, maintain consistency, and improve their overall success rates in winning over prospects and turning them into loyal customers.

A sales cadence typically includes a combination of different sales channels such as cold calling, cold emailing, social selling, and in-person meetings, that are strategically planned and sequenced over a specific period of time.

The purpose of a sales cadence is to keep the prospect engaged and interested in the sales pitch by providing them with relevant information, addressing their concerns, and ultimately convincing them to make a purchase. It is an effective way to manage and optimize the sales process, and it can be customized to suit different sales situations and customer profiles.

The most common sales cadence is the email sales cadence.

As you can probably guess, the basis of your sales cadence, in this case, is an email sequence. Email sequences are a set of several emails, a good initial number is three, but some SDRs have been known to create a lot more.

In the first cold email, you want to offer a brief introduction about the product or service you sell and name yourself and your title. Yes, they will see it in the signature, but by introducing yourself in this manner, you become associated with your company. They know who you are now.

A follow-up email would include additional information not revealed in the introduction email. You could set it up to run 2-3 days after using a sales outreach tool. As your first email was a brief introduction to your product or service, this follow-up could include additional features you could not cover or explain in your first outreach attempt.

For example, suppose you sell a time-tracking application, in your first email. In that case, you introduce it and yourself, and in your second email, you could mention it also has a shared scheduling option so that the entire team can see when each person is busy.

If you provide all this information in your first email, it can be heavy and confusing to the reader, so splitting it up is best.

In your third email, you want to be as direct and clear as in your first one, but this could also be a good time to try to offer something in exchange - a lead magnet. Perhaps the time tracking application can offer a free trial period or a discount if companies sign up for two months. And you could offer it in this third instance to arrive at a sale or meeting - you want your call-to-action (CTA) to be clear and the same throughout all instances.

While an SDR email cadence is the most basic form of a sales cadence today, you can also apply this to other methods. Perhaps a series of cold calls or LinkedIn outreach.

On LinkedIn, you can get very specific. You can start with a profile visit, do another one, then hit follow, start interacting with posts that the prospect likes or comments on, send a connection request with or without a message, and then send a direct message with a video. If you're more focused on social selling - creating your own posts to draw people in - seeing prospects like or comment on them before connecting with them to make the pitch is also possible.

And while we are focusing on B2B with LinkedIn, this can also be applied to other forms of social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok. Social selling is essentially making friends. Go about it like how you would make a friend on any of these platforms.

Now that we've discussed the types of sales cadences, it's time to discuss how we would create one here at SalesPipe. Sales cadences are a key component of our day-to-day. We like to think we have a decent level of expertise.

The first thing to do, once you know your product and marketing well, and once you've set your customer profile, is to write that first email. You want to ensure you have a series of sales cadence email templates you can use or work off of now or in the future.

We'd create our first series of three emails with the timekeeping application example mentioned above.

First, we want a clever, fun subject line. We want to use the lead's name, as it also draws their attention. And then, we want to respect what was mentioned about keeping each email clear and to the point. Around these emails, we will craft additional actions as part of the sales cadence for the salesperson.

A timekeeping application is useful in a variety of fields. It is likely that we will be able to find our prospects on LinkedIn, so this is where we will have additional actions.

Furthermore, let's say our customer profile is also focusing on a startup founders demographic that is constantly on the go and does not have time to answer an unplanned call. We want to avoid the phone call in this instance, but we could add a video.

Our cadence could look something like this:

Subject: {{first_name}}, running out of time?

Hi {{first_name}},

Do you often wonder where the time for your projects went? And why do you dedicate so much time to tasks that seem like they should not take as long?

I'm Flor, Sales Lead at TimeKeepers, and I'm here to answer these questions for you.

We are ready to help you and your team keep track of how much time you really spend on your projects. This will help you reorganize and reprioritize your tasks for, as they say, time is money.

Want to learn a bit more - what's your availability for the rest of this week?

Best,

LinkedIn action: Profile Visit and Follow.

{{first_name}},

I was gazing at the calendar on my wall today and thought of you!

Why, you might ask?

Well, it's not just because my deadline is growing closer, but because I realized I forgot to inform you about our team scheduler feature here at TimeKeepers.

Not only do we help you and your team keep track of your time so that you can reorganize your tasks, but we also help you keep each other updated as to your availability throughout the day. Two birds, one stone.

How do the next two weeks look for a quick call?

Cheers,

LinkedIn action: Like or Comment on the Last Post.

{{first_name}},

Hello, it's me!

I was wondering if after all these emails you'd like to meet - to go over everything - they say time should not be wasted, so we won't let it.

(Yes, I was listening to Adele!)

And I wanted to let you know that here at TimeKeepers we currently have a 20% discount for the first two months of our services for any new clients signing up.

Do you have some time for a quick chat before the end of the month?

Best,

LinkedIn action: Connection or InMail.

You connect if you get to the end of the cadence and then can try for a social sell, starting out an entirely new, LinkedIn-based cadence. Or you can send an InMail or a connection request with your sales message, or a video message link directly. That would be up to each individual and what works best for them.

The sales cadence is the ultimate tool in sales - whether you're doing it old school via phone or with influencers on TikTok. If you wield it well, you are sure to constantly have revenue and customers coming in.

You just have to make sure you understand your audience, their interests, what works, and where they are. Then use all of this information to sell to them in the way that appeals most. With some creativity and insight, you've got this in the bag.

At SalesPipe, we are experts on the sales cadence and would love to help you expand your customer base - get in touch with us to find out more.