A sales cadence, as used in marketing, refers to a sequence of touchpoints with a prospect to establish a connection for engagement or to make a sale. Essentially, it is a schedule that sales reps stick to when following up with prospects.
Touchpoints
A touchpoint is a contact with a prospect—channel notwithstanding. It could be face to face, over the phone, via emails, on social media or even through voicemail.
There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to how many touchpoints it takes to engage a prospect. It all depends on what you are selling and to whom. Reducing the number of touch points is common in small-scale transactional sales. In enterprise sales with year-long sales cycles, the numbers may vary wildly.
A sales cadence starts with lead prospect software from the first point of contact. It plays out until the prospect becomes a customer or exits the sales cadence into the nurturing bucket.
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How to Build a Sales Cadence
Building and shortening your cadence so you don’t keep prospects in the pipeline longer than they need to be is not a one-time thing. The algorithm may change depending on the target market, persona and region. In truth, it is more of a trial-and-error situation until you find what works best for you.
Follow these tips and perhaps you won’t have that difficult a task ahead of you trying to find what works best for you:
Understand the Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is very important in reducing the number of touch points. You need to research and understand everything about your potential customers in terms of what platforms they are on mostly, what their pain points are and most importantly, how your solution benefits them.
Choosing the Channel
A half decent sales cadence will have to include emails, phone calls, social media channels and other ways to reach prospects. Consider the platforms where your prospects are most active and use it to your advantage.
Number of Touchpoints
To grab a prospect’s attention, you need to contact them at least seven times. It stands to reason that a model sales cadence should have anywhere between 8 and 12 touchpoints.
Spacing the Touchpoints
You already are guaranteed to interact with the prospect at least 8 times so timing these touchpoints wrong will do more harm than good. For instance, contacting them more than thrice a day is just being a nuisance to them and increases the risk of them falling out of the deal.
Give it a day or two before making contact again.
Lifeline of the Cadence
The length of the cadence is measured from the very first touchpoint to the last. The ideal duration should be between two and four weeks. Shortening your cadence is of course possible with factors like how fast and often your prospect engages with your emails coming into play.
Content
It is impossible to wrap up this guide without mentioning just how important the content you put across in all the touchpoints is. Some sales reps get a lot more from shortened sales cadences simply because they have quality content.
Craft your emails and phone calls with one singular thought: so it yields good results. Without the right content, you will get little impact from your lead prospect software—which negates the whole idea of lead prospecting.
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