Top 3 Things You Need to Perfect Your Sales Cadence

Old-age questions: How often should I be contacting my leads? Should I use email, or voicemails? The VP of XANT Labs, Gabe Larsen, was a guest this week on the B2B Growth Show podcast. He discussed the three elements you need to perfect your sales cadence. And, you guessed it – one of them is sales cadence research to show you industry averages.

Gabe discussed the “Sales Cadence” research from XANT Labs, that shows the average sales cadence numbers for nearly 9,000 companies. The study details how companies are using a sequence of sales activities (cadence) to reach their leads, qualify and nurture them to reach closed deals.

XANT research shows sales cadences have five main attributes: attempts, media, duration, spacing and content.

Understanding Sales Reps Biases and Boasts

The surprising results of the study highlighted the gap between what sales reps ‘think’ they are doing and what they are doing in reality.

“When you ask sales reps how many times, that’s attempts, that they follow up on inbound leads, one study says 15.5, another study says 12.1. When we actually audited the data and looked at what people really did, the number was at 4.05,” said Gabe Larsen, on the show.

Study Reveals Sales Cadence for Thousands of Companies

Know What the Benchmarks are for Your Industry

So, how do sales leaders overcome the issue of reps overestimating their results? It’s not a simple equation. They need to understand the benchmark results that are applicable to each industry. They should also judge their rep’s performance and their sales cadence against that, preferrably by an external auditor, adds Gabe Larsen.

“It’s difficult to take a general study and say ‘this is what is happening and this is what best practice is.’ The biggest differentiator you see is that of industry. For example, duration of a cadence was very long in the software industry, of almost to 60 days. Whereas in transportation, it was in the single digit. Spacing was really tight in the finance industry, meanwhile in healthcare it jumped to five or six days,” added Gabe.

See What Cadences Fortune 100 Companies Use

Testing Your Sales Cadence

If you want to find out if you have the right sales cadence, XANT has created the perfect tool for you. Enter your company information in the sales cadence assessment tool at cadenceassessment.acceleratewww.insidesales.com. You will receive a score for your cadence, based on the research and industry averages.

“A lot of people have a hard time measuring their cadence. They get into their CRM and they talk to their people, and people tell them they’re doing great. At times they can’t pull all relevant data out of the CRM, and so they’re like, “Oh, where should we be?” This is probably the best first step. Go to our tool and see what your score is,” added Gabe.