For sales teams to succeed, before planning a sales process and strategy for a particular purpose or goal, it is important to plan for your buyer’s journey. With a sales cadence that allows your brand to deliver timely and relevant information on products and services, each communication with a prospect helps move them further down the buying funnel.
A good sales cadence is one that enables a continuous flow of leads into your pipeline. In today’s largely digital driven marketing and sales environment, a good sales cadence has to have relevant touch points with a multichannel approach including social media and cold calls.
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A well planned sales cadence allows sales teams to automate and prospect at scale, it allows better efficiencies when the structural framework of what message will be sent when is already laid out.
Prospects today receive hundreds of cold emails and cold calls, a sales cadence that is well thought and hits the right buying triggers at the right time will help sales people plan regular follow ups that lead to conversions. Sales leaders who understand their own product and the typical customer’s buying journey for their industry will be able to use actual real-time sales case studies to plan a more targeted sales cadence that addresses buying triggers as they change.
Sales Cadences are Important to both, Sales Teams and Businesses Because:
-Sales teams can use sales automation to create templates out of their planned emails and sales cadence, thereby saving time during the sales cycle
-A sales cadence that is worked on to strengthen an outbound sales strategy can improve the quality of prospect conversions and conversations
-Sales cadences create structure for multiple sales teams that could be distributed globally, thereby allowing all the sales reps to have a similar tone and follow up style
-A structured sales cadence that is always working as a ready-sales- reference will help sales people maintain consistent messaging
How can sales teams create effective sales cadences that drive customer journeys?
A few things to keep in mind:
Building a sales cadence can’t be a one-time process
Business trends and customer trends and buying habits are always changing. Moreover, for every target account list or target market that a sales team has, there has to be a new sales cadence put in place based on buyer personas, regions, industries, etc. While sales leaders might consider replicating the fundamental aspects on one sales cadence for another geography with deeper customizations or adjustments, what matters is that building a sales cadence can never be a one-time activity. It is a continuous process that needs to constantly be optimized and adjusted based on actual prospect behaviour (response to emails / calls / etc), and changing business goals and trends.
Opt for a multichannel sales cadence but understand where your prospect is
Your prospects of today are always-online but each one sports different online behaviors and patterns. Some prospects may be more active on platforms like LinkedIn and might prove to be easier to reach through these networks while others may be more responsive to an email-heavy approach.
While every sales leader today knows the importance of using a multichannel sales approach that typically includes email, social media, cold calls, maybe even direct mail among other touch points, breaking down the frequency or type of messaging for each channel should be planned based on prospect behaviors.
When you notice during a previous campaign that some prospects or geographies seem more ready to read emails while others seem to be more active and responsive to your follow ups on LinkedIn, adapting your sales cadence to suit this actual pattern based on your available data can help drive a more streamlined and result-oriented sales cadence and process.
Not too many touch points
Sales leaders have the power to plan their prospect journey by putting themselves in their prospect’s shoes and answering questions that they feel would crop up with simple, customer focused messaging. Sales leaders also have the power to define how long a typical sales cadence and outbound campaign for a set target list should last. While most sales teams plan sales cadences that have at least 08 to 12 touchpoints, each sales team has to identify what would work better for them based on their prospect’s changing behavior between months, current industry updates (was there an acquisition or other key news that could be included into the campaign cadence?), what end goal they are trying to achieve, etc.Â
While sales teams can keep a basic framework in place, further changes to the number of touchpoints can be personalized based on real-time need and trends.
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Your Sales cadence shouldn’t be too long
Once you have your list ready, it helps to define a period of time during which you want to run a particular cadence for that list of prospects (eg. One month, two months). At the end of this timeframe, proper evaluation of the campaign ROI (conversions/ in-progress conversations / number of cold prospects, etc) can help sales teams further improve on their sales cadence to drive better value for a revised or new list with updated sales messaging.
Be different with your sales content
A good sales cadence is one that has seamless sales content and a structured content flow planned out for all the touchpoints. This is where sales leaders need to constantly optimize what every outreach would say and how. Planning the content and content flow remains one part of the journey, the other lies in presenting these in a unique manner to your prospects so that it captures their attention. In a largely digital buying and selling environment, using the right channel (eg email / social) with interactive, out of the box messaging / gifs / videos and more  are becoming more of a necessity to break the ice and initiate sales conversations.
