Sales Cadences: Winning Examples and How to Use Them

What Is a Sales Cadence?

Running a sales cadences has become the standard for modern sales teams, who use them to help sellers to improve their outbound sales and manage a larger number of prospects in their outreach efforts.

Sales cadences are a combination of different activities and follow a strict timing. This eliminates all the guesswork and ensures sellers always know what comes next and can continually move each prospect forward without missing a beat. cadences also establish standards and best practices for your sales team. This means that the results and effectiveness of contact patterns and messaging can be measured and optimized for success.

A sales cadence can be triggered by certain activities, such as downloading website content, attending a webinar, clicking on an ad, or even just by adding people to a list of prospects.

The most effective sales cadences start with 'touching the water' to see if the prospect is even interested and move up to cadences with call activities and social messages.

Below are a few tested cadence examples you can use to get you started.

Examples of Cold Outbound Cadences

Depending on the length of your sales cycle, any of these outbound examples may work for your strategy. We generally recommend at least 3 interaction channels for a cadence, including phone calls, email and LinkedIn.

The cadence examples below range from examples of low touch cadences (minimal effort for the sales rep) to high touch cadences (great time impact for the sales rep).

Example 1: low touch cadence

A low touch sales funnel is one in which prospects are contacted, nurtured and sometimes converted into a customer with little or no human interaction.

With complex products, most sellers aren't sure how to use this type of outreach to their advantage, but here's what you can do. Use a low touch cadence to "touch the water" and find out if the prospect is even interested in listening to you at this point.

Sales action platforms like Leadcamp allow you to automate the process of listening for intent signals and notify you when it's time to pick up the phone. At this point, the prospect transitions to a blended cadence (see below).

As you can see above, this is an example of a low touch cadence performed in Leadcamp with intent listeners. No human intervention is required to build and execute this cadence, while still approaching the prospect in a way that feels human.

Bottom line : keep this cadence at 3 touchpoints to see if your prospect is interested in listening to you and if the timing is right.

Example 2: blended sequence

A blended cadence is often used to combine a lot of automation with a few touchpoints that take time from the salesperson, such as calling prospects.

The example below is used for prospects coming out of the low touch cadence above and starts with a phone call. It is a very short one because it should be seen along with the previous steps.

As you can see here, there are steps included for reviewing steps and listening to engagement. You can do this manually or use a tool like Leadcamp to help you automate this flow for your entire sales team.

Example 3: high touch cadence

A high touch sales funnel is one that requires the most time and effort from your sales team. It is often heavy on personalization, optimizing each step of the funnel for a particular prospect with lots of call activity and other personal touch points.

It is also meant for a slower, more nurturing kind of flow. The seller can make the initial contact by offering great value and making sure the prospect knows they are an expert.

Even though this is an impactful cadence, there's still a lot that can be automated and it's worth setting up a cadence for this type of outreach, just to make sure you can keep up the pace and not miss anything. Because we all know that following up at the right time is the golden rule in sales.

Examples of re-engagement cadences

Timing, as they say, is everything. Sellers can use this cadence in multiple scenarios to reinvigorate a potential deal, whether they got zero response or it just wasn't the right time for the prospect.

The good news with this type of cadence is that you can take a more relaxed approach than with cold calling. You should already know their pain points and what they are interested in, so use that to build your cadence.

Reengagement cadences can be used for a variety of situations, for example, the first one below is designed to start two weeks after prospect went cold. The second one is designed to be sent when a certain level of content interactions were spotted.

As a sidenote: keep emails brief; no need to bombard them with information.

Example 1: re-engagement for cold prospects

Day 13 (after last contact): check back in and provide some value

Repeat on day 26, 38, 50: Continue to add value to your prospect and share relevant content (articles, ebooks, video,...) and pull out the highlights of each piece to convince them it's worth reading.

Listen for engagement! Between each email, listen for engagement to see if they are consuming your content. If not, you'll know you need to change course and not just continue. If you do see engagement on a particular piece, build from there (see example below).

Example 2: re-engagement after spotted activity

The goal here is to send that very well-timed message and make your prospect feel like you are around to answer all their questions.

To give you an example, you have put a prospect in a nurturing flow and plan to contact them again in 3 months. What if, in the meantime, they visit your website, participate in a webinar or simply download a piece of content? Indeed, these signals are often missed.

Your solution is building a re-engagement cadence that is triggered immediately if this prospect engages before the scheduled follow-up. At Leadcamp, we wait 12 hours before contacting a message like this:

After this one, we follow up with a call a few days later depending on the activity on this email.

Examples of follow-up cadences

These cadences come into play when sellers, for example, have been on a demo call and want to make sure the ball keeps rolling.

You can make this type of cadence heavy on activities or keep it simple, which is up to you. For example, you can opt for just 4-6 touches with an alternating mix of phone and email over 7-10 days or choose one of the examples below.

Example 1: follow-up with calls

Day 2: Phone call

Day 3: Phone call

Day 4: Auto email

Day 7: Phone call

Day 7: Auto Email

Day 8: LinkedIn message

Day 11: Auto email (bump)

Day 14: Auto email (routed based on engagement)

Day 17: Task to review account & decide

Example 2: follow-up without calls

Day 1: Manual email

Day 4: Auto email (bump)

Day 4: LinkedIn message

Day 6: Auto email (bump)

Day 10: Auto email

Day 12: Auto email (bump)

Day 14: Manual break-up email

Day 24: Task to review account & decide