Five Pitfalls of Automated Sales Cadences

Like many of you, I get pitched various products and services all the time - it's the nature of the position. One of the product types I've been pitched by several vendors is around sales engagement & cadences, which is amusing because I am often on the receiving end of how companies use these products to automate their sales outreach.

In theory these platforms can and should help sales and marketing teams efficiently scale and optimize their efforts. Unfortunately over the past few months, I've seen several issues with how these platforms are used that I want to share to try and help companies that use or evaluate these systems:?

1. Too many messages

Just because you can drop prospects into a 15-point automated cadence with all the glorious 1-to-1 marketing content you can ever dream up, does not mean you should do that. In fact, I'll state very clearly that everyone needs to stop doing that right now. You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm 10 emails in since mid-August from one right now and that's after a 7 email cadence from May through June.

The frequency of messages and lack of time between messages is completely overwhelming, and that's before we even consider the number phone calls and LinkedIn messages that are mixed in!

2. Too obvious it’s not personal

With my role being in the sports industry, in theory it should be VERY easy to tailor the email content to what I do. Instead, I end up getting the same generic AI / BI / ML / Tech / Analytics themed messaging that I know is being sent to anyone and everyone. This is the quickest way to tell me you have no idea how you can actually help me.

I'll also note here that you need to pay attention to your target company names (e.g. singular vs. plural, official name vs. DBA name, etc.). I love when someone tells me they "want to help New York Football Giants." If a person were typing that sentence, they would add "the" before New York and probably leave out the word Football, but automated cadences just drop values into templates.

3. Disconnect with existing relationships?

This is a special case of the previous issue and probably the most important item on this list. I was recently put into an obvious cadence with a research company where I had past conversations with the individual that I was now receiving emails from again, but those emails had zero connection with the multiple conversations we had only a few months prior. This usually happens when marketing decides to execute these cadences without close collaboration with sales to identify targets that would no longer fit the cadence model and should receive personalized messaging.?You need to be particularly careful using these cadences to re-engage because the lack of historical context really limits their effectiveness.

4. Tracking links can backfire

We all know that links in emails are easily tracked and therefore can and should be used to identify a prospect's interest. However, once I'm confident that an email is part of a cadence, I become less inclined to click on something even if I'm interested because I know it will automatically trigger a call or email shortly afterwards. If I'm really interested, I'll go out of my way to try and find that content you linked to on my own just so I can avoid the next step of the cadence.

5. Getting too cute

This last one can happen at any stage of the cadence, but for now I'll focus on how these cadences tend to end. Every company seems to have the same type of "break up" message along the lines of, "Well, I guess this is goodbye" or "I was hoping to help but I guess our stars didn’t align." I'm sorry but we can't break up if we were never engaged (or even dating) to begin with. You think this is adding a “personal touch,” but the actual result is completely impersonal.

Bonus: Gift card giveaways

I know I said five in the title but as I was wrapping up, I thought of one more that's not specific to cadences but has always troubled me. I am personally not a fan of the "$XX gift card to take a 30-60 minute meeting/demo/etc." tactic. I'm sure there's plenty of people that like this, and maybe it works for some folks. For me, it immediately feels like I'm just being bribed, and if the product isn't interesting enough for me to take the demo on its own merits, then I'm just doing it for the gift card, and that's not how I want to spend my time

I know this post is a bit of a tangent from my usual LinkedIn content (a friend of mine called me a "virtual job board" for all the sports business analytics job openings I post every couple of weeks), but I think this has implications for sports-related sales too, whether you are trying to sell your products in to sports teams and leagues, or if you're with a sports property and evaluating these products to support your own outbound sales team. Automated cadences can be additive to your sales and marketing efforts when used the right way, but you need to be aware of how they can backfire too.