I’m a salesperson to my core – from the psychology of overcoming objections to building effective sales systems. Give me a CRM, email and a cell phone, and I’ll feel like a kid in a candy store.
When I started Flight Media, our sales process was pretty much just that. Add leads to CRM. Email leads a few times. Call occasionally.
But at the end of our 3rd year in business, I realized that to grow revenue predictably, we needed to add another component to our sales process.
Enter: The Sales Cadence.
Most salespeople have either never heard of a sales cadence or don’t fully understand WHY they need it.
In this post, I’m going to break down what a sales cadence is, why you need them, and how to track them. And then give a few examples of how we use sales cadences to close deals – left and right.
A sales cadence is simply a sequence of sales activities that you follow for certain leads.
For example, if you offer a free consultation on your website and someone fills out the form, the cadence is the list of things you do to finalize/schedule the first meeting.
It might look something like this:
If the lead responds on Day 2, then you no longer need to continue the cadence, because they’ve already booked the meeting or told you “I’m not interested.”
Just like a drummer keeps a beat for a band, a sales cadence will keep a steady beat for your sales pipeline.
A sales cadence typically includes three different touchpoints: Email, Social Media and Calls/Voicemails.
The cadence you develop for different sales pipelines may differ, but it should always include a combination of these three forms of communication.
If you want to scale your business, having effective systems in place for every department is vital.
Just like your products are created the same way or your services are delivered the same way, your sales process should follow suit.
Having a cadence does two very important things:
Chances are, your business has a slow season. (So does ours.)
Having proper sales cadences in place can help you gain momentum in your slow season and mitigate lost revenue.
Quick story:
Every year, December is a super-slow month for us. However, by the 3rd December we were in business, we were prepared.
We ramped up our target accounts’ sales cadence (more on this later) and closed nearly $100,000 in new business in a matter of <45 days.
Needless to say, it was an unbelievably profitable December.
By now, you probably realize how valuable sales cadences are and that you need them.
But what if you have a 10-day sales cadence and you put 10 people/day into it?
That’s a TON of steps to track! Unless you have a good system for keeping track of where each person is in your cadence.
Sure, you can technically track where each lead is in your cadence inside a spreadsheet, but that will quickly become a nightmare.
To track efficiently, we highly recommend you use a CRM.
A good CRM will allow you to attach dollar amounts to each lead, take notes on them, track their stage in your pipeline, etc. At Flight Media, we use Hubspot.
