4 sales-winning contact cadence principles & how to apply them
If a lead submits an enquiry and you don’t respond within 5 minutes, you could lose 87.5% of potential sales.
This statistic was reported in the XANT Lead Response Study 2021, and reflects the game-changing insight first brought to light by Harvard Business Review in 2011: When it comes to lead response, speed matters. And so do a lot of other aspects of sales effectiveness.
Speed. Consistency. Tenacity. Professionalism. These are qualities that you look for in your salespersons, and for good reason. But have you provided them with the guidelines, structure and tools required to bring out those qualities and apply them optimally—so that they can engage more leads and close more sales? Do they have a systematic, strategic procedure to follow and implement, consistently and uniformly, to cover all bases and maximise their chances of converting prospects? This is what contact cadence is all about.
In this article, we’ll look at:
What a contact cadence is and why it’s essential in your lead-to-sale process
The 4 principles of a sales-winning contact cadence
A good example of an effective contact cadence
Enforcing your contact cadence and turning strategy into action
What is a contact cadence and why is it important?
A contact cadence, also known as a sales cadence, is a regular procedure, sequence, or schedule of communication touchpoints, pre-established to direct salespeople in how and when to connect with prospects—in a way that’s typically aimed at maximising the chances of converting leads and winning sales. The touchpoints employed in any one contact cadence commonly include a variety of communication channels, including phone calls, emails, instant messaging and social media.
If you have a practice within your sales team to, perhaps, call a prospect once every day for a week until they pick up, then you already have a contact cadence. Most of us in sales are fully aware that calling prospects once, or sending a single message, is almost certainly not enough to engage them, let alone convert them. So we develop certain routines and practices that have, through time and experience, seemed to work well for us—and we stick to them. We then also pass them on to our subordinates, in an effort to cultivate practices that we believe work best.
However, the reasons to enforce a contact cadence within your sales team do not stop there. Especially in larger sales forces, but also in smaller teams, a standardised contact cadence is invaluable for monitoring sales performance. If every sales rep follows the same routine and strategy in conducting their sales actions, you would, as a manager, be much better able to assess their performance metrics and identify individual strengths and weaknesses related to other aspects of the sales process.
On top of that, an official, well thought out and enforced, contact cadence ensures that the methods applied by your sales reps are not adopted just by instinct (which cannot be tested and confirmed), but by strategic thinking and quantitative evidence.
The 4 principles of an effective, sales-winning contact cadence
For designing the right contact cadence for a team, we’ve developed the S.T.A.T. system, which stands for Speed, Tenacity, Avenue & Timing. It helps you determine when, where, and how many times you should reach out to a prospect until making contact.
1. Speed
Slow and steady doesn’t always win the race. In fact, when it comes to lead response, it almost never does.
It wasn’t just the Harvard Business Review that revealed the importance of speed in following up on leads. The March 2011 article “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” had reported the finding that businesses that took the action of calling prospects within the first hour of receiving the lead, were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead than those that followed up just one hour later—and over 60 times more likely than those that followed up more than 24 hours later.
Many more studies have been conducted since, whose findings further support this insight. XANT, a sales engagement enterprise leader, published a report in 2014 that showed that responding to a lead within 5 minutes of receiving the inquiry increases conversion rates 8 times over. In 2021, they conducted the same study with updated data, and found the very same result.
How does all this data apply to designing contact cadences? Simple: Make sure your first follow-up action is conducted as soon as you possibly can, if not immediately.
2. Tenacity
Ever since the start of the cold-calling era’s decline, most people have felt that pestering a lead who doesn’t want to talk actually does more harm than good to the brand. Because of this, and also because they feel that it’s a waste of time, most salespeople these days call a lead once, get no response, then give up. Or they might try again, but only after a couple of days. Now, I wonder, would these salespeople give up so easily if they knew that calling more times in the same day can result in up to double the chance of successful contact?
In the book The Conversion Code, Chris Smith shares results of a survey that shows that calling a lead multiple times significantly increases the odds of successful contact. Calling a lead 6 times, instead of just once, increases the percentage of leads you successfully contact from 48% to a whopping 93%. Even calling just a second time gives you a notably better chance, at 70%.
On top of that, you don’t have to (and shouldn’t) wait another day to call again. You can make the second call 10 minutes after the first, the third call 20 minutes after the second, the fourth call a couple of hours later, and so on. And if you’re really afraid of annoying the prospect, you can use other mediums instead. If the lead doesn’t answer your second call, drop them a text message (the old prescription used to be to leave a voicemail, but does anyone listen to those anymore?). Use text messaging, email, social media—these are all wonderful gifts of the digital age, so make the most of them.
3. Avenue
What channels of communication do you use to contact your leads? Presumably, your lead generation process (e.g. enquiry form) collects at least a phone number and/or email address. Calling and emailing are certainly essential steps in any modern contact cadence, as well as social media channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, as supplementary cadence points or if you don’t yet have their personal contact information.
Additionally, there’s one particularly valuable medium that, oddly enough, is often overlooked and left out from the standard contact cadence across many industries: WhatsApp. Aside from being the most popular mobile messaging app in the world, and also in Southeast Asia, data from our SalesCandy records of over 1 million leads shows that WhatsApp is by far the most frequently used communication medium of all sales actions (42%, compared to even calls at 27%). Leads, customers and salespersons alike are all most comfortable using WhatsApp, so including it as a key touchpoint early on in your contact cadence will likely result in positive outcomes.
That being said, not every contact responds to every communication medium the same way. Any good contact cadence will incorporate a wide range of mediums to cover all bases. Some people might always have their phones on silent mode but check their emails regularly, while others might ignore calls from unknown numbers but open every WhatsApp or text message. Don’t leave a single stone unturned.
4. Timing
We all know not to call people at 2 in the morning. There are outright wrong and acceptable times to contact prospects… but have you ever wondered if, within the acceptable time frames, there are better times than others?
In the seminal Lead Response Management study conducted in 2011 by insidesales.com, it was found that prospects are more responsive during certain days of the week, and at certain times of day. On average, leads are more likely to answer calls during the middle of the week—on Wednesday or Thursday—than on other days. The best time? 4 to 6pm. 8-9am is also good, and was shown to result in the highest rates of qualifying contacted leads.
There are also optimal times for sending emails. In a review of 14 data-driven studies of email sender and recipient behaviour, it seems that the hands-down best day to send emails is Tuesday, for the highest rates of email opens and in-mail link clicks. The data on email times is a lot more varied; some studies show that open rates are highest between 9-11am, while others suggest times like 6am, 2pm and even 8pm as the best times.
The most reliable way to find the best times for you, especially if you send regular nurturing emails as part of your contact cadence, is to do your own testing. Divide your contacts randomly into several groups, and send the same emails out at a different time for each group. Business apps like Mailchimp and Hubspot make it easy for you to do this A/B testing and track the results.
Enforcing your contact cadence and turning strategy into action
Establishing a contact cadence is the vital first step in the lead-to-sale process, but it would be meaningless if it weren’t enforced. The strategy is just the blueprint; action is what drives results. Even a mediocre plan that’s put into action is better than an excellent plan that isn’t. And all leads are dead leads if they are never pursued.
You might think it seems obvious, but the fact is that 73% of leads submitted never get contacted. Bewildering, right? Why would anyone spend so much time, money and effort on advertising and marketing to generate leads, but then don’t spend nearly as much time, money and effort converting these very same leads?
Even the companies that do respond, take days to make first contact—and as we now know, this hurts conversion rates in a big way. However, we also know that it isn’t easy to manage leads and respond to all of them quickly. If you manage hundreds of leads distributed among multiple salespersons, responding to leads within 5 minutes might seem impossible to you. But the reality is: It’s entirely possible, as long as you have the right tools.
In e-commerce and other fast-paced industries, automated messaging tools like chatbots are useful, and typically sufficient to facilitate conversions. But for industries with longer lead-to-sale processes like real estate and insurance, it’s undeniable that customers still require the human touch. What we need here is to automate what can be automated, while maintaining the customer-to-salesperson interactions.
This is where a lead management system (LMS) comes in. With the right LMS, you can say goodbye to all the tedious work you put into manually managing leads. Most of the processes in your lead-to-sale journey—like lead capture, lead qualification, lead distribution, data organisation and reporting—all of it, will be automated. All you need to do is watch as it unfolds (and manage your salespersons). All your salespersons need to do is wait for their phones to notify them of fresh incoming leads, and follow the contact cadence to act swiftly and effectively.