The key to a successful sales cadence is perfect communication timing, the right number of touchpoints, and a solid sales strategy behind all your efforts. Personalized channels also help you execute the sales cadence more effectively.
But 60% of prospects say 'no' multiple times before agreeing. Getting the cadence right takes precision.
To help you take your successful sales to the next level, here’s a complete guide on how to create a sales cadence that your prospects will actually appreciate.
Define a sales objective
Your entire sales process must align with your sales end goal to deliver results.
Defining the objective is fundamental to your cadence. It lets sales reps know each step of the process and the logical next step at any point.
From the prospect's perspective, the objective is what they see and feel the salesperson is trying to do. This is what makes sales objectives so vital to the cadence, as it’s how prospects experience the process.
Ensure effective results by staying true to cold outreach best practices. Design each step to move prospects toward the final stage.
Examples of goals for your sales cadence should be scheduling a demo for the product, getting the prospect to fill out a form, or getting them on a video.
Make your cadence goals narrower than overall sales goals. Sure, you can have an overarching goal to get a certain amount of customer traffic on product pages, but your cadence goals should be smaller, like getting a prospect to the signup page quicker.
How to create sales cadence goals
You can create effective sales cadence goals by:
Thinking about the ideal conclusion of each point in the sales cycle
Factoring in the number of outreach channels you typically use
Considering the most streamlined approach to closing each stage of the cycle
Aligning each goal with its respective sales cadence touchpoint
The key is to help the prospects understand what’s happening and make their journey easier.
Determine your target prospects
Your target prospects are the people you direct your sales efforts to. You likely already know who forms the bulk of your customer base.
Inbound customers often differ from outbound prospects in meaningful ways. The former group will often be too diverse and random to create a sales strategy around.
Outbound sales require a few groups with specific qualities that are relevant to your business and have the potential to become customers.
These are your prospect personas.
The major factors you can use to group your prospects into personas are:
Company size
Industry
Title at company
Territory
Buying habits
Behavioral traits
This will help your salespeople form an image of your prospect and personalize the sales experience for each group. It can also help you determine who not to target for each goal.
For example, if you notice a prospect with a specific buying habit delays your progress toward a cadence goal, note it in the persona and seek prospects already primed for that goal.
How to create prospect personas
Here are a few ways to create prospect personas:
Gather insight from your sales team: The best way to create prospect personas is to gather real, actionable insights from your sales team. Since they’re the primary customer-facing individuals with firsthand experience analyzing customers, they can offer a comprehensive view of the ideal target audience.
Review market research: You can review any available market research relevant to your customers. This way, you can see trends and patterns of prospects similar to your market space.
Analyze customer data: Sales analytics are great for collecting data on customers. While they typically provide basic data, you can gather a considerable amount quickly. This makes it easier to see patterns.
Put prospects into persona segments
Once you have your prospect personas, you can start segmenting your existing lists into those personas.
This will accomplish two major goals that every sales team should have:
Refine B2B sales prospecting to where you’re able to automate several parts of the sales funnel
Personalize the sales cadence to each group and cut out redundant steps for specific personas
You can also use the cues from your prospect personas to make better design choices for your sales content, adjust touchpoint timing, craft more convincing calls to action, etc. This is how you can grab the prospect’s attention more effectively.
In case you don’t have prospect lists to segment into personas, you can look at your existing customers and make sample groups out of them. Doing this will limit your outreach capability to a specific type of customer and provide valuable insights.
Set communication channels for different personas
The next step of sales outreach should be assigning the appropriate communication channels to different prospects.
This is so you can reach the right person and maximize response rates.
Most sales cadences today use a multichannel approach. The vast number of platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, and business forums, make it necessary to diversify outreach.
You can also choose channels according to what has worked for you in the past and how you reached existing customers.
If a prospect is more engaged with a specific channel, the entire sales cadence will be more effective.
How to set different communication channels
As mentioned, most sales cadences use a multichannel approach. This lets you try out all available channels to see what sticks.
The multichannel approach utilizes all the tools needed to reach out to prospects. While this broadens your reach, it does mean more time spent on the initial outreach.
Start with the channels that align with your overall business goals. For example, if you’re selling to distributors and retailers, your prospects will likely be on professional forums instead of social media, such as Instagram.
From there, the best approach is to validate those channels for that specific prospect and use the data to make better prospect personas.
Personalize the sales cadence for prospect personas
With the many sales cadence examples and templates, it is easy to forget about personalization. Instead, adjust certain touchpoints, individual steps, and, most importantly, sales content for each prospect persona.
It simply means you should adjust certain touchpoints, individual steps, and, most importantly, sales content.
When personalizing, make sure that your salespeople understand each step of the sales cadence and can execute it differently for each persona.
The outbound sales cadence can be completely formal (if you’re dealing primarily with high-level executives) or somewhat informal (if you’re selling to mid-level staff or B2C buyers).
Keep personalizations distinct for each persona, even when personas share common characteristics. This is because some prospects may prefer being reached through one channel and receiving follow-ups through another. For example, cold calling and leaving a voicemail, then sending a follow-up email.
It seems like an obvious part of ‘personalizing’ the experience. But it’s easy to get details mixed up when there are multiple similarities across a broad audience.
How to personalize the sales cadence
Every step in the sales cadence should include the ideal prospects, time, channel, and content.
You can personalize the cadence by considering the following persona factors:
Preferred channel
Number of outreach attempts
Timing of contact attempts
General messaging
Content design
Timelines for the next steps
The content is the aspect of your outreach that benefits the most from personalization. Just ensure that while it can be different to some extent, it maintains alignment with your brand identity.
Offer more value through outreach
Each step in the sales cadence should bring value and streamline the process. So, evaluating each step and determining their necessity is essential.
According to research by PwC, only 30% of customers hold high levels of trust in companies. Focusing on and offering what consumers want can increase their trust. Affordability, treating your employees well, and high-quality product/service variety are among the top ways to build consumer trust.
How to increase value through outreach
Value can take many forms, such as:
Information: Ensure your sales cadence includes information that helps prospects understand what makes your product worth purchasing.
Resources: You can utilize various resources that explain the measure of a great product.
Soft skills: Active listening, asking the right questions at the right time, and focusing on solving prospects’ problems are effective ways to increase value.
Soft skills are especially important because most sales reps talk about the product itself instead of what that product can do for the prospect.
Decide on the right number of outreach attempts
Earlier, we stated that most prospects say ‘no’ several times before saying ‘yes.’ This is where the importance of the right number of outreach attempts comes in.
Some prospects may respond after two to three phone calls or emails, while others may require more. Consistency is always great when building relationships with potential customers.
However, apply that consistency to your approach and timing rather than the frequency of your outreach.
Instead, decide the right number of outreach attempts by looking at existing sales data and established prospect personas.
Think of outreach frequency like building any professional relationship: consistent enough to stay top-of-mind, but not so frequent that you become a nuisance.
You may have to contact them a few times for that to happen while maintaining a respectful frequency that preserves the relationship.
How to determine the number of outreach attempts
Deciding the right number of attempts comes down to:
The expectations set during the initial conversation
The prospect’s schedule
Whether the salesperson had a connection with the prospect before the first contact
The number of outreach attempts is determined case-by-case until you can add the findings into a solid persona.
Sales cadence best practices
When designing your sales cadence:
Know each individual prospect: This seems like a lot of work, especially if you’re working with a large number of diverse customers. However, it pays to know the prospects before heading into the sales cadence's main points. You can do this by creating highly detailed prospect personas and gathering data on incoming prospects via the channels they’re coming through.
Prospect experience matters: How the prospect feels at any point in the sales process defines the value and effectiveness of your process and salespeople. Make sure your sales cadence centers around the best prospect experience possible, and you’ll be able to close more deals.
Experiment and test: If you have the opportunity to do so, tweak your sales cadence according to conversion rates and experiment with new techniques. Test different approaches to find what works best for your team and prospects. Test your cadence with different sales tools and platforms to find out what works best for you.
Don’t rush it: The entire point of a sales cadence is to set the pace of the sales process according to the involved touchpoints. A pace that's too fast or too slow decreases the effectiveness of each touchpoint and weakens your overall sales strategy. The best way to shorten a sales cycle is to maintain an appropriate, steady pace from the start.
Incorporate prospect needs with goals: Most importantly, include the prospect with your sales goals in the sales strategy. This means focusing on their needs, preferences, and how they can benefit from your product.
Making the most of an effective sales cadence
Selling to savvy buyers requires identifying their viability as a prospect. This ties back to creating a prospect persona to craft your sales methodology around.
B2B buyers are diverse, making it hard to identify which prospects are actually in-market and ready to buy.
UserGems identifies which prospects are in-market based on job changes and buying signals, so you can focus your cadence on buyers who are actually ready. This way, you’ll be able to create an effective sales cadence, optimize your outreach, and grow your sales pipeline more efficiently.
Why UserGems
UserGems tracks job changes and buying signals to help revenue teams identify in-market buyers and automate relevant outreach through AI agents. We track when your champions change jobs so you can reach them at their new companies. We also map buying groups to show you the best entry point into each account.
Companies like Mimecast, Greenhouse, Medallia use UserGems to reach their revenue goals, quickly and efficiently.
