How to Build the Ultimate Sales Cadence

You’re not going to believe this. We just completed our State of Sales Development report, the largest study ever on sales development. We now have nearly 1,500 companies giving us insights into how they structure their teams, buy technology, and how they structure their sales cadence to move leads down their pipeline.

Outbound Sales Cadences - Going Beyond the Surveys

One of the biggest findings was -- what are reps actually doing when it comes to outbound sales cadences? If you’ve been in the sales industry for a while, you’ve probably heard of studies that mandate we should contact people 15 or 30 times when prospecting. Have you heard of those? The thing is, those studies are surveys and like most data, they need to be interpreted in the right context.

I wanted to go beyond surveys.

I wanted to know what companies were really doing when it came to their sales cadence so we decided to do the following experiment.

1) Ask hundreds of companies what they believe their sales cadence is.

2) Examine the InsideSales.com big data set to see what people are actually doing and what they should be doing.

The Pillars of a Sales Cadence

We currently have the largest sales data base in the world with 6.7 trillion data points. That’s trillion with a T. I can’t believe this experiment had never been done before. I was excited as I’ve ever been about sales data with this idea. To make sure make sure we did it right, we studied the data across the pillars of a sales cadence. This is really important so listen to this. The pillars of a cadence are:

1) Attempts – the number of total touches on a lead or contact.

2) Media – The different communication methods used

3) Duration – The time between the first activity in your cadence and the last activity in your cadence.

4) Spacing – The time between each activity.

5) Content – What you actually say or write in a phone call or email.

Okay, so with that basis, here is what we discovered. Get ready to have your minds blown.

Attempts

Let’s first look at attempts or how many total touches occur on a lead or contact. When we surveyed the companies and they told us they believed their reps did 15.1 total attempts on average. That’s not surprising: if you google how many attempts companies should be doing, you’ll see a lot of references to ~15.

Remember though that this is what companies 'said' they did. The question then arises, what does the data say they actually did?

When we looked at the InsideSales.com big data set we found that the typical rep was doing 3.5 attempts on average. That’s a big difference between believed and actual. I think I go to the gym three times a week but I never actually go.

Now, that’s all interesting, but was was optimal? Well, optimal was 7 attempts. In fact, if you go over 7 attempts on an outbound cadence your ability to contact someone drops by 67%. That’s huge!

One thing that we saw a lot in the data is this concept of 'recycling' and it’s important to mention here because you need to start practicing this concept. It’s not that you only hit a target account seven times total. You should run a ‘play’ with around seven attempts and then let the contact sit for a few weeks and then run another play and hit them seven more times. You can repeat this as many times as needed.

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