How to Create a Consistent Sales Cadence

Our time is valuable. Every minute not prospecting and engaging potential clients is time lost. One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned as an SDR has been to structure my day efficiently by balancing best practices, data analytics, and persistence. Keeping organized can be difficult for SDR’s that have pipelines of 200-300 leads, so having a structured cadence through a tool like SalesLoft/Outreach is key to maintaining consistent outreach.

Day structure: When SDRs start, it typically is one of their first jobs, which makes it challenging because there tends to be a lot of freedom in sales. Sticking to a disciplined and structured schedule helps with consistency, a virtue that is invaluable in sales when dealing with the peaks and valleys of the month-to-month SDR grind. Based on public sales data, there tend to be pockets of time that are best for reaching out to decision makers. Here’s the schedule that I like to follow. Note that I stick with one activity (phone, email, other) to maintain focus, which can be difficult in an open-office.

On Mondays, I tend to use the morning period for prospecting.

Tuesday – Friday:

8:30 AM – 11 AM: Call

11 AM – 12:30 PM: Email

12:30 PM – 2:30 PM: Refresh/Lunch/Email

2:30 PM: Prospecting

3 PM – 5:30 PM: Call

5:30 PM – 6 PM: Prospecting

KPIs: The best SDRs have both personalization and volume of outreach. I typically hold myself to 40-60 calls a day and 40 tailored emails. I typically don’t leave voicemail because of the low return on time investment.

Pre-outreach:

It’s important to use all the tools you have at your disposal to truly understand the prospect and how to message them. I typically use Datanyze, BuiltWith, Spyfu, ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg and LinkedIn to learn more not only about the prospect but the company as well. Companies receive solicitations all the time, so it’s important to demonstrate that you are an expert in their industry and that you partner with companies in similar situations.

If your prospect has a LinkedIn profile, viewing them helps keep you top of mind and humanizes you.

Outreach: Most public sales data says that it takes 5-12 outreaches to connect with a prospect. My cadence reflects this and has been successful for me, as I have to be especially persistent with larger companies.

Day 1: Step 1: Call

Day 1: Step 2: Email

Day 3: Step 3: Phone

Day 4: Step 4: Email

Day 7: Step 5: Phone

Day 7 Step 6: Email

Day 10: Step 7: Phone

Day 12: Step 8: Email

Day 14: Step 9: Phone

Day 16: Step 10: Email

Day 19: Step 11: Phone

Day 21: Step 12: Phone

Day 21: Step 13: Email

Day 22: Step 14: Nurture or Repeat

“Template the structure, personalize the content”:

I’m a big believer in personalized and tailored messaging for prospects. As SDRs, our job is disruptive because we interrupt our prospects’ days. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, if the disruption is valuable. Whenever I email a prospect, I ask myself, “If I were them, would I want to read this email?” Every touch point, whether it be a phone call or an email, should provide value to the prospect so that they can do their job better.

We must remember that our prospects are human too. They have their own beliefs, dreams, worries, and personal KPIs to accomplish. As sales reps, we need to empower them with knowledge that will help them in their own careers, lifestyles, or whatever drives them.

While personalization is so important, SDRs need to be able to scale their outreach to reach hundreds of prospects – otherwise, why would a sales org pay your salary? To this end, I believe the best approach is to “template the structure” of the email – Salesfolk has some great literature on this. Basically, you should have email templates centered around different challenges that your product can solve and the body of the email should also be structured. Personalization comes through the CONTENT of the email. The actual meat of your email should be tailored to your prospects’ needs and KPI’s.

The 3 paragraph template is very popular because it’s digestible for a prospect. Something like this is a good start:

1. Personalized observation of a problem/challenge/issue that company faces
2. Anecdote/social proof of a similar client that had similar problem/challenge/issue and how you solved it
3. Call to action/ask

So the structure is templated and we know what we want to say in each paragraph. All we have to do now is fill in the blanks to personalize and tailor the message.

Creating the right cadence for you..

This post isn’t meant to be a be-all-end-all for cadences; rather, it should be a foundation of how to create a cadence that fits your product, prospects, territory, and KPI’s. For example, an SDR with a monthly quota will approach outreach differently than an SDR with a quarterly quota, especially since the quarterly quota SDR likely has a product with a longer sales cycle and average deal size. Adding in video emails or doing social touchpoints on LinkedIn or Twitter can be very valuable as well.

 

-Brandon Huang-

Brandon is currently a Sales Development Representative at Yotpo, where his goal is to help eCommerce companies to achieve their revenue goals and solve their biggest challenges. He is proud to be in SaaS sales and enjoys building valuable business cases for his prospects with data. In his free time, Brandon enjoys exploring new restaurants and cuisines, traveling around the world, and staying up-to-date on current cultural and technology trends. He’s always happy to connect and have a great conversation.