4 Tips To Building an Effective Outbound Cadence in Salesforce Sales Engagement [Former High Velocity Sales]
5 min
Generally speaking, a sales cadence is a timeline of sales activities and methods that your sales agents can follow to engage with leads, according to how they respond to each step. Using sales cadences, you can streamline the sales process, making it easier for your agents to organize, nurture, and convert leads. Developing an effective sales cadence typically requires access to advanced sales tools that integrate directly with your CRM software.
For example, Salesforce High-Velocity Sales allows managers to build sales best practices right into Salesforce using automated sales cadences. These cadences guide both new and veteran agents through the process of prospecting and nurturing opportunities. This hinges on functions that allow managers to dictate essential steps, like when to email a prospect, when to call them, when to wait, and more.
The benefit of using sales cadences for outbound sales is that you can simplify otherwise complex processes, allowing your agents to save time, thereby increasing efficiency and productivity. There is a diverse suite of functionality available when it comes to creating outbound sales cadences in Salesforce High-Velocity Sales. If your goal is to build and implement an effective sales cadence using Salesforce High-Velocity Sales, here are some tips that may be helpful to you during that process.
1. Determine How Many Touch Points Belong in Your Outbound Sales Cadence
You need to identify the best number of times to reach out to an outbound lead before developing your sales cadence. Hubspot found that the average sales rep only calls leads 1.3 times before they give up on developing the prospect. In most cases, this won’t be nearly enough. In fact, it can take as many as eight attempts for sales development reps to actually make contact with a lead.
In some cases, it can take quite a few more touches to get a response from somebody. That’s why it is important to find out who your average customer is and plan your sales cadence around their typical habits. By figuring out exactly how many touches you need to include in your sales cadence for optimal results, you can keep agents confident in the process as they continue to reach out to leads that have not yet responded to their efforts.
Timing is key when it comes to preparing effective outbound sales cadences. While you do want to reach out to leads as often as possible over the span of the cadence, you should avoid becoming too spammy as this increases your chances of being ignored. Start off by putting a day in between each contact attempt in your cadence, then increase the number of touches as leads progress through your cadence. Keep the overall cadence under a maximum of four weeks or so to ensure that leads have enough time to decide whether or not they wish to engage with the agents who are trying to contact them.
2. Set Specific Goals For Your Outbound Sales Cadence
Identifying a set of goals for your outbound sales cadence can help you develop a sales cadence that routinely achieves key objectives. It isn’t necessary to be over-ambitious by aiming to close a deal each time you reach out to a prospect. Rather, many firms benefit from staggering specific goals for each stage of the sales cadence.
For example, one touchpoint may be oriented towards encouraging leads to request a product demonstration while the next could be designed to lead prospects into signing up for a free trial. These goals are similar, but not identical. Therefore, they both offer unique outcomes that should be accounted for in your sales cadence.
Overall, the purpose of a sales cadence is to build a strong connection with leads to set them up to make a purchase. If you set the same goal for every touch, your agents may not be prepared to accept other responses from leads in order to build valuable relationships. In some situations, this could lead to them pressing toward an unlikely goal instead of working to increase trust with the prospect in order to encourage them to make a purchase.
3. Identify The Best Time of Day For Outreach Activities
Knowing when to contact leads can strengthen your sales cadences significantly. The more detailed you are in planning the timing of your sales cadence, the more effective your agents’ outreach will be. For instance, many sources state that the best times to cold call are from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM and between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM. You can capitalize on this information by instructing your agents to make high-value calls during these hours.
Understand that making cold calls is not about you and your preferences. Instead, this process should be focused on your prospects and their specific circumstances. For example, if you know that your prospects are mostly high- to mid-level managers, they will likely be available at the start of the day. Yet, if your leads are mostly employees, you are more likely to be capable of reaching them after lunch hours and later in the day.
Of course, not every call can fall into the sweet spot. When planning your sales cadences, prepare your agents for the possibility that they may need to make contact with leads outside of the ideal time periods. To do this, you can implement a condition that states when agents should reach out via email rather than over the phone.
While it may not be best to call at a certain time, times that are bad for calling tend to be perfect for sending an email. Remember, you need to use every tool available to reach certain prospects. By evaluating patterns that you notice in lead response, you can identify the best times to call, email, or otherwise contact your leads. These activities can be further segmented by creating specific guidelines that tell agents when to contact cold, warm, and hot leads.
4. Measure and Track Your Results
Understanding what engagement you are attracting through your outbound efforts can give you key information that can be used to fine-tune your sales cadence and the related sales processes. Fortunately, Salesforce High-Velocity Sales automates the process of collecting data that offers insights into how leads are engaging with each step of your sales cadences. This platform automatically tracks key metrics, such as how many leads have entered and exited the sales cadence, how many people opened emails or clicked through on a landing page, and how many follow-ups have been made via phone call, social media outreach, or email.
Measuring and tracking your results helps you ensure that your agents aren’t allowing leads to fall through the cracks as they progress through each stage of your sales funnel. For optimal results, be sure to test your sales cadences and adjust them as needed to find out what structure is most likely to produce desirable outcomes.
Outbound Sales Cadence Examples
It may be difficult to develop your own unique sales cadences without some form of reference to work from. These are some outbound sales cadence templates you can use to get started with building an effective sales cadence.
Two-Week Outbound Sales Cadence Example
If a prospective client that you wish to contact has had no prior connection with your company, it may make sense to start off with a 6-touch approach. This ensures that you are not spamming them from all channels and instead encourages your agents to space out points of contact so the entire process lasts two weeks in total. If the first 6 touchpoints are ineffective, you can follow up with a break-up email and after that send one touchpoint each quarter.
Here is what the two-week outbound sales cadence looks like:
- Two-Week Outbound Sales Cadence Example
- Day 1: First email and first LinkedIn connection
- Day 2: Email touchpoint
- Day 4: Morning phone call, evening voicemail
- Day 7: Email and InMail
- Day 11: Phone Call
- Day 14: Break-Up Email (if no response has been received)
10-Day Outbound Sales Cadence Example
If you are looking for a sales cadence that is on the shorter side, a 10-day cadence may be suitable. You can adapt the following steps for your own unique circumstances.
- 10-Day Outbound Sales Cadence Example
- Day 1: First email
- Day 3: Morning email, afternoon call
- Day 5: Morning call, afternoon call with voicemail, followed by social media touch
- Day 7: Morning email, afternoon call with voicemail
- Day 10: Morning email followed by call
If you don’t notice results from this cadence, try waiting for a period then implementing another sales cadence that is more focused on longer-terms.
Long-Term Outbound Sales Cadence
Sometimes there is no need to stay on top of your leads in the short term. By spacing out touchpoints in your sales cadence, you can give them the time they need to respond when they are available. Here is our suggested long-term sales cadence procedure:
- Long-Term Outbound Sales Cadence
- Day 1: First Email
- Day 2: Morning Call with Voicemail, Afternoon Email
- Day 7: Morning Email, Afternoon Call with Voicemail
- Day 14: Morning Call with Voicemail (can replace or add social media touchpoint to avoid repetition), Afternoon Email
- Day 21: Morning Email, Afternoon Call with Voicemail
- Day 35: Morning Call with Voicemail, Afternoon Email (can replace or add social media touchpoint to avoid repetition)
- Day 49: Morning Email, Afternoon Call with Voicemail
- Day 63: Morning Call with Voicemail, Afternoon Email (can replace or add social media touchpoint to avoid repetition)
- Day 77: Morning Email, Afternoon Call with Voicemail
Create Effective Outbound Sales Cadences
Sales cadences offer you the chance to create routine guidelines for how sales procedures should be handled. By timing your lead touchpoints strategically, you can stimulate higher response rates and more positive outcomes. This is essential for companies that aim to turn prospects into sales.
If you're a Salesforce admin looking to learn the more technical side to this, read more about HVS cadence creation tips, including Flowcharts, OOP, Branch Management 101, and more.
You can also signup to try PhoneIQ for High-Velocity Sales by following this link.
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