How Good Is Your Sales Cadence? Take the Test!

How do you start in 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 to initiate a conversation with a potential prospect. And without knowing what best practices are, sales reps are at risk of failing the sales cadence test.

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.