5 Winning Sales Cadence Examples (and Lessons to Draw from Them)

So you finally have leads flowing into your pipeline, but you’re unsure how to manage them. The chances are you need to develop a solid sales cadence for your sales team (or your current one needs some refining). A good sales cadence brings structure and order to how reps engage leads, improving productivity and performance.

This post helps you build a winning sales cadence by taking a look at examples that have already been shown to work. The blog entry then draws lessons from each of these cases and provides practical tips to put these ideas into action within your own lead generation and sales process.

Sales Cadence: Some Basics

To make sure we’re on the same page, let’s first lay out some sales cadence preliminaries: what it exactly is, why you need one, and what other things to have on hand.

A sales cadence is simply a timeline of sales activities and methods reps follow to engage leads. For example, if one of the starting points in your sales conversion funnel involves a lead filling out a form on your site, the steps you take to contact that prospect and get him to agree to a face-to-face meeting make up your sales cadence.

Having a well-defined sales cadence makes things in your sales process run more smoothly and more efficiently. That’s because of a sales cadence:

• Maintains consistency by providing a set of specific and common procedures for reps to follow
• Keeps everything easy to monitor and measure, making managing and optimizing the sales process simpler
• Speeds up conversions by removing potential choke points or leakages
• Allows you to quickly scale things up (such as growing your team or doubling your pipeline)

For a sales cadence to be effective, you need a few key elements: multiple channels (emails, phone calls, social media), 6 to 8 touches to generate leads, and a CRM to track everything.

Sales cadences vary by process, but the core idea is consistent, sequential touches. Complex sales processes may need several months of nurturing, while transactional sales cycles can be shorter.

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Advantages of Sales Cadence

If you’re looking to create your own sales cadence (or looking to tweak your current one), there are plenty of ideas to borrow from the following proven examples.

Example 1

Our first sales cadence example comes to us from Sales Hub CEO Max Altschuler. This is a widely cited sales cadence and works great as a starting reference

1. Day 1: Email/InMail
2. Day 3: Email in the morning, Call in the afternoon
3. Day 5: Call in the morning, Call with a voicemail in the afternoon
4. Day 7: Email in the morning, Call in the afternoon with a voicemail
5. Day 10: Email and call in the morning

As you can see, this sales cadence consists of 10 touch points spread over 10 days.

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Example 2

The next example works well for lengthier sales processes. It’s used by one of InsideSales.com ’s clients:

1. Day 1: Email 1
2. Day 2: Call 1, Voice mail 1, Email 2
3. Day 7: Call 2, Voice mail 2, Email 3
4. Day 14: Call 3, Voice mail 3, Email 4
5. Day 21: Call 4, Voice mail 4, Email 5
6. Day 35: Call 5, Voice mail 5, Email 6
7. Day 49: Call 6, Voice mail 6, Email 7
8. Day 63: Call 7, Voice mail 7, Email 8
9. Day 77: Call 8, Voice mail 8, Email 9

This sales cadence uses up to 25 touch points spread over 77 days (a little over two-and-a-half months).

Example 3

Once again, we’re using a working outbound sales cadence developed by one of InsideSales.com ’s customers as an example:

1. Day 1: Emails 1 and 2
2. Day 2: Email 3
3. Day 3: Call 1, Voice Mail 1
4. Day 4: Social Media 1, Email 4
5. Day 5: Call 2, Email 5, Social Media 2

This sales cadence packs a lot of touches in such a short time period (5 days).

Example 4

Brandon Huang, an SDR at Yotpo, shares a 22-day sales cadence idea he says helps him produce consistent results.

1. Day 1: Email
2. Day 3: Phone
3. Day 4: Email
4. Day 7: Phone
5. Day 7 Email
6. Day 10: Phone
7. Day 12: Email
8. Day 14: Phone
9. Day 16: Email
10. Day 19: Phone
11. Day 21: Phone and Email
12. Day 22: Nurture or Repeat

Brandon Huang’s sales cadence consists of 13 touch points done over 22 days.

Example 5

Here’s a sales cadence example that managed to deliver some pretty impressive results. Carlos Montero, CEO of digital marketing consulting firm Biassa, says this sales cadence helped him book meetings with 11 of the biggest e-commerce companies:

1. Day 1: Prospect Research
2. Day 2: InMail
3. Day 3: Follow-up InMail
4. Day 4: Email
5. Day 5: Follow-up Email
6. Day 6: Phone
7. Day 7: Social Media (share an article and tag the prospect)
8. Day 8: Video Email
9. Day 9: Social Media (engage prospect on LinkedIn)
10. Day 10: Voice Mail
11. Day 11: Email
12. Day 12: Phone or Email

Carlos Montero recommends setting aside as many as 22 days to carry out all these activities.?

The Takeaway

A sales cadence helps your team navigate the often choppy waters of revenue generation. It keeps your reps’ momentum more consistent and their performance more measurable. With these lessons and tips, it’s easier to develop or optimize your own sales cadence.