Outbound cadencing
What is outbound cadencing?
An outbound cadence is the schedule and frequency at which a business uses outreach to speak to leads, prospects, and customers.
If you have a newsletter that goes out once a month, it has a monthly cadence. You might have quarterly product updates, or bi-weekly emails designed to drive a specific action on your website.
Different outbound cadences can prompt different actions with varying degrees of success. Businesses will likely have different outbound cadences for different audiences, and maybe even for different segments with those audiences.
We’ll look at why outbound cadencing is important, and how you can use it to great effect in your sales outreach.
Why is outbound cadencing important to sales?
Outbound cadencing helps create a pattern of engagement
Outbound cadencing is helpful for sales because, when you apply it consistently, your audience begins to expect your comms at a certain time.
Think of a person or business you follow who posts on a regular day, like clockwork, every week. You know that content is coming, you might even look forward to it, and make certain to watch, listen, or read as soon as it lands in your inbox.
Establishing a regular pattern helps your audience understand when they can expect to hear from you, and can prompt them to engage with that messaging because they know it’s coming on a specific day.
Random emails that your audience didn’t expect are far more likely to go unopened, or even get deleted.
The same goes with phone calls, if you’ve established that you’ll call to check in with a prospect in a month’s time, stick to that time. Unexpected calls are rarely appreciated.
Outbound cadencing can add impact to your communications
Your cadence can help establish a type of tone to your communications. If you only send product updates once a year, that has far more weight than if you send an update every week.
These more important communications will also likely have a higher engagement rate, so consider sending fewer emails for greater impact.
An outbound cadence is consistent
Perhaps the most important benefit of having an established outbound cadence is that it keeps things consistent. Without one, you’re left sending messages at random.
Perhaps one sales rep will send a follow up email as soon as they’re off a call. Another might wait a day. Someone else might wait a week. This results in a haphazard cadence that can’t be predicted, and can’t be analyzed accurately.
This can negatively impact your email deliverability, so it’s important to have a consistent volume of email that you’re sending each month.
Having a consistent cadence helps keep your team on the same page. If everyone knows that follow-up emails are always sent a day after the initial contact, there can’t be any mix-ups when it comes to inheriting a prospect or email list when people change teams. It also makes things easier for new team members, as you can show them your entire outbound cadence strategy on a single page.
An outbound sales cadence helps align marketing and sales teams
An outbound cadence is vital to ensure your sales and marketing teams aren’t sending outreach at the same time.
You don’t want your marketing team to send their monthly update, just as your sales team has decided to send a product-focused email. If they haven’t segmented their audiences properly, you could end up emailing your entire contact list at the same time, which would guarantee low open rates, and might even result in unsubscribes or spam complaints.
If everyone is aligned on when communications go out, and operate on the same schedule, you can avoid conflicts, and work together for greater effect on coordinated campaigns.
Outbound cadences help with scalability
Lastly, once you’ve established an outbound cadence that works, you can use it to scale up as needed. If you go from two clients to twenty, or a hundred contacts to a thousand, you can rely on your cadence to keep things moving forward.
Once you start doing things at scale, it’s hard to keep track without a proper system. A cadence helps keep things in perspective, allowing you to know where you are in the sales cycle based purely on the emails and other comms you’ve sent out.
How to establish an outbound cadence for sales
Set a goal for your outbound cadence
Different cadences can help achieve different goals. If you’re trying to nurture new cold prospects, you might want to start slowly, explaining who you are and what you offer.
For long-time clients, you might only want to update them when there’s something important to mention, say every quarter.
Decide on a goal, and match your cadence accordingly.
Pick a target audience
Now you have a goal, consider the industry, company size, job titles, and geographical locations you want to include in your contact list for this cadence. Segmenting your audience gives you the best chance of them engaging with your outreach.
Decide on channels for each segment
Next, you need to pick the best channel for your outreach. We’ve been talking a lot about email, but platforms like LinkedIn or Tik Tok might work better for your audience.
If there are social media algorithms to consider, be sure to factor those in – there’s no point only posting on Instagram once a month for example.
Establish your cadence
Your cadence should depend on:
- Audience
- Channel
- Messaging
- Goal
Your data team can help you establish what the best cadence is based on each of those factors, and can help analyze your cadences for better results over time.
Remember to add value with each piece of outreach
When you’ve set up a sales cadence, it can be easy to get lost in it, and start sending outreach purely to match the cadence you decided on.
Don’t fall into that trap. One of the most important rules of sales is to add value every time you connect with a prospect, so ensure that every email, every social post, and every phone call are helping your targets with something, or are establishing you as a voice they can trust.
How Surfe can help with outbound cadencing
Unfortunately, every year around 20% of contact data in a CRM becomes outdated due to data decay.
When people change jobs, change their names, or move to different teams, your contact data for them might not be accurate anymore, and if your contact data isn’t accurate, you can’t communicate with your audience properly. This means missed opportunities, damaged relationships, and poor email deliverability.
It used to be that the only way to keep your CRM up to date was with length audits, that would take days or even weeks of time that could have been spent on prospecting.
But now, Surfe helps keep your CRM up to date with reliable data by scanning your database against your contacts’ LinkedIn profiles. It compares the two, and alerts you if any information needs to be updated.
This way you can be confident that all the contact data in your CRM is accurate, helping you get more conversations started, and more deals closed.
Let’s wrap it up!
Outbound cadencing can have a big impact on your relationship with your audience. It can help establish you as a regular presence in their inbox, especially if you’re providing them with helpful content. It can boost your engagement rate, by helping them know when to expect your emails. And it can help you with analysis, as having a regular and consistent cadence allows you to better analyze and improve your outbound strategy.
Of course, your cadence can’t help you if your CRM data isn’t accurate, so keep your database clean and up to date to have the best chance of getting a conversion.
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