Finding Your Foundation: Rethinking the Sales Cadence For the Digital Age – Info Sales

If you want to grow a reliable revenue, you have to find a steady rhythm. This means marching to the beat of your own drum by developing a sales cadence. A sales cadence is a networking system that maps out how often you try to connect with prospective clients. Once you send the initial message, whether it’s an email or face-to-face meeting, the following steps you take will determine whether or not your prospect becomes definite.

When you have an organized sales approach, you’ll grow your network at a steady pace and keep momentum even during your slowest months. You’ll be able to track where you are in the networking process and never lose contact with a potential client. But in order to get on track, you must take full advantage of the digital space. To make sure you don’t miss any of these opportunities, we’ve outlined a few ways you can increase engagement and restructure your sales cadence to make it compatible with the digital age.

Understanding Your Current Sales Cadence

Before you think about changing your sales cadence, it’s important to get a good grasp of your current practices. If you haven’t already, map out your strategies and study your engagement stats.

• What day and time do your emails go out?
• How long after do you follow up to book an appointment?
• What time do potential customers usually respond to calls and emails?

To best keep track of your sales, relationships with customers, and where you’re at in the networking process, try using a project management software that will let your team map out your workflows in a visual way. You can then bring in collaborators from across the sales team to view and comment on the process. TechnologyAdvice.com has recommendations and reviews for the best sales and marketing project management tools.

Once you start keeping documentation, you’ll see which engagement platforms perform best. Take a look at just one month and see what brought in more sales: Calls? Emails? Social platforms? Events? The goal is to create a functioning and efficient line of communication, so you’ll have to fix what isn’t working and focus on what is.

Improving Your Current Sales Cadence

Now that you have a good idea of your most efficient platforms, it’s time to build on those strategies. Let’s start with emails. You may have noticed that the timing in between consecutive messages plays a part. Target Marketing suggests waiting 12 days for a second attempt, then six days for a third, and three days for a fourth. But there’s more to sending emails than the timing. Pay closer attention to what’s written in the message and make sure it aligns with the following:

• Be brief and blunt
• Ask direct questions that will lead to further discussion, but avoid biased questions
• Don’t offer all of your services in one email. Hold a little back for curiosity

Once you receive responses, you can test and use that data to alter your emailing schedules.

So what happens once you get someone to respond? Whether it’s a voice call, video chat, email, or social direct message, you should have a game plan for your follow up. It’s important to let your prospect guide the conversation, while you continue to send swift, informative responses as quickly as possible. You should also encourage them to set up an appointment for a call or face-to-face meeting.

Increase Engagement Using Social Media

If social media isn’t already a part of your sales cadence, you’re missing out. You want to maximize contact with your prospects, so take advantage of the apps they have installed on their phones. Gabe Larsen came up with three steps to connect with someone on LinkedIn.

1. Mention, like, share, comment, recommend, endorse, or follow
2. Connect with them by offering a referral, research, or case study
3. Invite them to an event, schedule a phone call, have an in-person meeting, or share valuable content with them

While it takes a few steps before sending a direct message, you’re more likely to be remembered and your client will feel like you’re genuinely interested and not a spamming robot.

Utilizing Sales Engagement Platforms

Using a CRM software or creating outreach programs won’t drive sales alone. Like we said before, you have to focus on engagement. The equation is simple: the more sales engagement, the greater the number of interactions, and the greater number of interactions, the more opportunities you have to make that sale. So how do you get started? The answer may be a sales engagement platform or SEP.

The SEP market is growing from $700 million today to over $5 billion by 2021, according to Aragon Research. This means it’s getting lots of attention, and it should be getting yours.

A useful sales engagement platform would encompass easily-accessible product and market information, integrated communication methods, engagement analytics, and guided selling to help you figure out what to do next, according to CIO.com. By using these platforms, you’ll still be able to control the means of communication while keeping track of what is and isn’t working for your company.

So do you see what you may be doing wrong? Take advantage of the digital platforms at your fingertips to create an easy-flowing sales cadence. Maximize engagement and make meaningful connections with your prospects. If you want to see which communication channels have worked best for other people, you can check out this 2018 Sales Lead Perception Survey.