What is a Sales Cadence?
Effective sales managers are always evaluating performance to help their teams improve. By promoting consistent sales practices, they empower reps to convert more leads, close deals faster, and track outcomes more effectively.
Cadences bring structure to this process by combining individual sales activities. A Sales Cadence is a predefined series of steps that guide a sales rep’s interactions with a lead or contact. It includes various touchpoints—like emails, calls, and social touches—spread across multiple days or weeks. Think of it as a playbook that ensures no lead falls through the cracks.
With the Sales Engagement Cadence Creator permission, managers can easily build customized cadences using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Once a cadence is activated, leads, contacts, and person accounts can be added by managers or sales reps.
Sales reps then work through each step directly from their personal To Do List, always seeing the next action to take and when to take it—no need to track where each prospect stands in the sales process. It’s a smarter, more efficient way to stay on top of every opportunity.
Why Cadences Matter?
Sales reps often struggle to stay consistent. Some leads get too much attention, while others are forgotten. Cadences eliminate this chaos by:
- Standardizing outreach based on best practices
- Providing clear, actionable next steps
- Automating repetitive tasks
- Delivering personalized messaging at scale
In Sales Engagement, different users have different permissions based on their role. Here’s an overview.
- Sales Engagement Cadence Creator: Sales managers can access the Sales Engagement app to create and edit standard cadences.
- Sales Engagement Quick Cadence Creator: Sales reps have the ability to access the Sales Engagement app and create or modify quick cadences.
- Sales Engagement Basic User: Sales reps can use the Sales Engagement app to work through targets using established cadences.
Cadences streamline tracking by clearly indicating where each prospect stands in the sales process. Managers typically begin by targeting high-volume sales processes with predictable steps, implementing these cadences first.
Below are some common scenarios where cadences prove ideal:
- Prospecting: Initiate contact with new leads to gauge their interest—a crucial process for continuously feeding the top of the sales funnel.
- Lead Qualification: Collect essential information to assess each lead’s decision-making authority, budget considerations, and timeline, ensuring you target the most promising opportunities.
- Event Follow-Up: Integrate conference or seminar leads into a nurturing cadence with customized steps and timing, tailored to your product and industry.
- Onboarding: Smooth out the learning curve during product implementation by addressing common pain points and guiding new users.
- Renewals: Support existing customers through the renewal process with a timely series of outreach emails and calls, starting well in advance of the renewal date.
Types of Sales Cadences
Sales Engagement provides two cadence types: standard and quick.
- Standard cadences, which are created by managers, are stored in the Public Cadences folder for team-wide access.
- Quick cadences consist of a single step and are saved by default in the creator’s My Private Cadences folder.
To learn a few examples of cadences, click Sales Engagement Cadence Examples
