Sequences

Messages and cadences that help you win

Once the SDR has identified all the ICPs inside a company, it’s time to enter the battlefield and start contacting them. In the next module, we will be talking extensively about cadences, how to manage them and how it will change depending on the characteristics of the market we are into.

But before going into detail, it’s important that you know what cadences are and why SDRs must use them.

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A cadence is nothing but a system that will tell us what to do at every moment during the time we are prospecting a company. Prospecting is not about sending an email to an individual or prospect and waiting for them to reply, if it was like this, we would get grey hair from waiting. To schedule a meeting, in the majority of times, an SDR has to make multiple touches, pursue the prospect, and be smart enough to create value in each of the attempts.

That’s why it’s important to create a cadence, to have distributed in a specific period of time (normally between 2-3 weeks) a set of touches that will allow us to increase the possibilities of accessing a conversation with the prospect. The distribution of touches is important that it makes sense, that there are days in between each attempt and that the SDRs while doing it, are comfortable and feel that doing each attempt really makes sense and that they are not being too intrusive but at the same time they are not being too conservative.

Finally, talking about the cadence we have to add another thing which is personalization. Even though we will have a predefined system, this doesn’t mean that we will not send personalized messages. On the contrary, the aim of all this is to be as efficient as possible but at the same time, to create the greatest impact. This is achieved by knowing how to identify the people we are going to include in a cadence and to whom we are going to send a similar message.

Multi-Channel Approach

• Call

In the B2B industry, the only way to reach prospects in a fast and scalable way if we move some years ago was to pick up the phone and start doing cold calls. Nowadays there is the debate over whether cold calling is coming to an end, for us, it is not, an SDR must be able to dominate as many channels as possible.

If you as an SDR get to master the art of the call and verbal communication with prospects, the call will for sure become one of the most powerful weapons for you since talking directly with prospects is when more valuable information can be obtained.

In addition, you only need to look at the large volume of companies that are going out to make calls over the internet such as Aircall or Twilio, the ones are raising millions and millions.

That’s why, if there’s one thing that can’t be missed in a cadence, that’s certainly the call. Obviously we won’t just include one call in a cadence, we’ll include more than one and distribute them over a few days. (In the next module we’ll look at the different cadences and how the number of touches in each of the channels and their distribution varies depending on the cadence we use).

The reason why we do this is because, as we said before, we have to be persistent in some way so, if we find that we can’t reach the right person on the first call because the receptionist won’t let us through, or we call and the person is not available, we’ll have to try at another time with another strategy.

• Email

Of course, as with the email, what cannot be missing in our cadence is the email. But there is one thing about the email, if it is not used well, it can be a great consumer of time, and the truth is that it is increasingly difficult to get good response rates in emails.

So, we’ll also have to find a formula to systematize the time we spend in our Gmail that allows us to achieve good results. The answer to this is: templates. And when we refer to this, we don’t mean messages that will be the same for everyone, we insist that personalization is the basis of our methodology.

Although we are going to dedicate a whole module to talk specifically about emails and templates, here we have to say that, as it happens with calls, we are not going to limit ourselves to send only one email to each one of the prospects. What we’ll do is to create a set of emails (templates) that will be sent almost systematically the day we have chosen according to the cadence. That’s why, no matter how many templates we create, as long as they are relevant and can be used for a considerable amount of prospects, it will be okay. The goal is to spend the minimum amount of time to complete the daily task of sending an email.

• Social Selling (LinkedIn)

And finally, what cannot be missing either in our cadence is the last incorporation to the world of SDRs, social selling. That’s the practice that is becoming more fashionable and which does not stop growing.

When we talk about social selling, the most common thing that comes to our mind mainly talking in a B2B environment is LinkedIn, and yes, this is the main way in which this practice is being implemented. Even so, when we talk about social selling, we are not referring to anything in particular, this concept is so wide that it opens the door to a world where there are practically no rules. Basically, social selling is a practice that you can implement on LinkedIn but that many people turn to using it over different social networks such as Instagram or Twitter. As long as it makes sense and can be relevant, social selling can be implemented through any channel you want, there are no barriers.

In fact, social selling is not only the channel through which we contact prospects but also the way we do it. The use of video and audio messages, for example, are growing exponentially and are great ways to generate impact and create this first relationship we are looking for with this methodology.

But let’s be honest and realistic and talk about what’s really going on in reality. The reality is that in many cases, due to the large number of people we will have to contact, we will not waste much time looking at possible social networks where we could assess whether there is an opportunity and where there is not. So, when we talk about cadences and ways of contact to which we should really turn our efforts on, we will focus uniquely on LinkedIn, in our cadence there will only be LinkedIn attempts in relation to social selling.

Types of Sequences

Thus, we highlight three main types of cadences:

• SHORT CADENCE (9-11 touches in 13-15 days)

  • 5-6 calls

  • 3 emails

  • 1 contact request + 2 LinkedIn messages

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Key challenge: Liquidity

We recommend it for dealing with Tier 2/3 companies. Since we may have many companies in our target market, we want a high pipeline liquidity with many companies entering and leaving the pipeline.

• STANDARD CADENCE (13-15 touches in 21-23 days)

  • 6-8 calls

  • 4 emails

  • 1 contact request + 2 LinkedIn messages
    

Key challenge: Consistency

We recommend it for dealing with Tier 2 companies. SDRs will probably be contacting medium-high position level ICPs and they want to follow a complete cadence in order to ensure they will do their best to reach out to them.

• LONG CADENCE (16-18 touches in 27-29 days)

  • 9-11 calls

  • 4-6 emails

  • 1 contact request + 2 LinkedIn messages

Key challenge: Perseverance

We recommend it for dealing with Tier 1 companies. Those companies where we will be contacting high-medium position level ICPs, but we will find difficulties as in the majority of cases the SDRs will have to interact with the gatekeeper. As it’s a long cadence, it’s useful when we want to assure our sales team gives their best to contact and create the meeting with key companies from a small market.

A/B Split Testing

Apart from the objectives of the company, one of the objective of an SDR (at a personal and at a team level) is to find out which methodology works best. Which are the BEST PRACTICES.

This will not only make the SDRs to improve their results, but as well it will create a whole amount of information tested by SDRs that will remain as super valuable data for the Outbound department of the company and for every time a new hiring arrives in the department, having all this information which has been tested will allow him to start generating good results as soon as possible.

To achieve this, the SDRs will have to go through a series of analyses called A/B tests. The idea here is to compare between two different methodologies and evaluate the results so from this point we can eliminate the things that are working worse and keep those that are working better.

To run an A/B test successfully, every analysis and thing we test will have to be for a specific topic.

For example: We want to analyze the contactability of our emails. Here, anyone would test two different emails and see which one has a better response rate. This is not an A/B test, an A/B test focuses on more specific things to identify exactly which things within each email work best.

So, for this particular analysis, a good A/B test would be:

- Same email but different subjects.

- Same subject and practically the same email, but we change the call to action.

- Same subject and same call to action, but we will change the value proposition.

These are the types of A/B tests we are interested in doing. As you can see, this analysis can be done for practically anything.In this section, we will focus on identifying how to do an A/B test to evaluate cadences.