Crafting a Compelling Message and Improving Your Follow-Up Cadence
When it comes to sales, planning is king.
Whether it is your sales process, or a follow-up sales strategy, you need to have a well-thought-out plan to achieve the desired results.
On average, prospects need to hear from you at least seven times before they decide to engage with your business. Clearly, this indicates that following up with your prospects only once or twice is not enough.
Even if you don’t get a response the first couple of times, there is a high likelihood that you will in the subsequent follow-ups.
The key here is to create a follow-up sales cadence to improve your chances of getting a response from your prospect and compelling them to take an action in the right direction.
What is a Sales Cadence?
A sales cadence, also called sales sequence, is a sequence of touchpoints that establish a connection with the prospect in order to convert them later in the sales cycle. This process usually spans over a few days to weeks.
This sequence of touchpoints is usually scheduled for sales reps to follow up with their prospects. The follow-up is done through emails, phone, or social media channels until the prospect either
converts into a customer or,
exits the cadence.
Improving Your Follow-Up Cadence
1. Research Your Prospects
You are trying to start a conversation with your prospects and convert them into paying customers. Trying to do that without researching your target audience is like hitting in the dark.
It is vital that you understand each of your prospects. Understand them by researching their pain points, goals, and everything else that may be relevant. This would help you craft a personalized message unique to them – something that they are able to resonate with.
2. Choose Your Mode of Communication
From emails to phone calls to social media to text messages, researching your ideal customer profile would also require you to determine the best ways to reach them.
Using only one mode of communication is not efficient enough to provide value. Therefore, go for an omnichannel approach.
That means selecting a set of communication modes and prioritizing ones that fit the prospect’s behavior the best.
3. Determine the Number of Touchpoints/Contact Attempts
One of the biggest mistakes sales reps make is not following up multiple times with their prospects. Even if they do reach out repeatedly, it probably happens twice or thrice. This occurs as a result of poorly planned sales cadence.
Irrespective of whether the prospects you have are cold or not, they typically need multiple touches at every stage of the sales process to continue engaging with your business. In fact, only 2% of sales occur during the first point of contact.
Ideally, your sales cadence should have 8 to 10 touchpoints.
While designing your specific cadence, choose a minimum touchpoint number. And stick to it. With consistent testing, you will realize the magic number that works for your business and its potential customers.
4. Define the Spacing of Those Touchpoints
In this step, you will define the time gap between each attempt you make to connect with the prospect.
This spacing is pretty important because you don’t want to bombard your prospect with too many contact attempts, making them feel trapped and frustrated.
Give them a breather. If they don’t respond, you can leave a voicemail as well as an email. But other than that, keep a consistent gap between each touchpoint.
5. Decide the Duration of the Cadence
From the first contact attempt to the last, duration is the length of your sales cadence. Generally, this length is 2 to 4 weeks. However, this largely depends on the prospect’s engagement with your attempts along with the value of the product or service you are selling.
If you offer a high-value service, the cadence would, of course, be longer. Once you have decided the duration of the cadence, you can now craft the message you want to convey to your prospect.
6. Convey the Right Message
Your copy is one of the most significant aspects of your sales cadence. A good message will communicate value to your audience in a way that speaks to them.
An effective message starts by creating awareness for your prospect. It then follows by building an interest and ends with prompting your prospect to take action.
Not only should the message be relevant to your audience. But it should also reach them at the right time. It must directly target their pain points and solve a problem for them.
Never underestimate the power of a nicely-crafted personalized email. Ideally, your email should always cover the following aspects:
A compelling subject line. The goal is to prompt the audience to open your mail. Don’t forget to mention the prospect’s name!
An email body. This would explain your services to the prospect and touch on their struggles. Generally, you want to let the prospect know why you are reaching out to them and what can you do to help. Additionally, mention other customers who are benefitting from your services.
A Call-to-Action (CTA). Guide your prospect to take the desired action towards the end of the email. Provide relevant links for them to be able to contact you easily.
7. Test Continuously and Draw Insight
You’ve now got your cadence in line. It is time to start reaching out to your prospects and send them messages frequently.
But this is not the end.
It is important to remember that every cadence is different. You need to draw insight from your prospect’s reactions to see how you can optimize your sales cadence to generate better results. Test new approaches and see how each of your tactics play out with eah one.
Furthermore, check your cadence periodically for any leaky holes that may exist and find ways to fix them.
The maintenance of your sales cadence is going to be a continuous process. Modify your strategy as you see fit according to the prospect, situation, and use case.
The more you understand how your prospects react to a certain cadence, the more you will be able to fine-tune your process and achieve your desired goals.