How to Build Sales Cadences in Salesforce

Is your sales team using Salesforce? If so, there is a powerful opportunity to optimize sales by building sales cadences directly within Salesforce. This post covers what a sales sequence is and why your team can gain a powerful advantage from using Salesforce-native sequences.

What is a Sales Cadence/Sequence?

To stay competitive, using a sales cadence (also called a sales sequence), or automation of sales messaging, is no longer just an option. Today, it takes an average of eight touches before a sales rep makes contact with a lead. These touches need to take place across three or more channels (phone, email, social), at different times of day to keep up with buyer preferences. But for teams using Salesforce, it’s far more powerful to use sales cadences directly within Salesforce.

Without the power of cadencing, it is extremely difficult for a sales rep to reach the right person at the right time, in the right place, and with the right message, across the hundreds of prospects they are expected to work every week. Sales reps need a systematic, organized prospecting schedule that prioritizes their work every day. If you need a starting place for building a new strategy, check out our post on sales cadence examples.

There are many ways and tools to help you build a sales cadence, but many sales teams may be unaware of one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to do so… directly in Salesforce. 

Why you should build sales cadences in Salesforce?

One of the biggest advantages of a cadence or sales sequence built directly in Salesforce is that it keeps your reps in your system of record, where they already spend most of their time. It also ensures that all actions performed through the cadence, as well as their outcomes are recorded in Salesforce. That means reports, dashboards, and updates all take place in the same tool, instead of needing to jump to yet another software. This also means you can cleanly tie your cadence decision-making to business results, such as revenue or demos booked.

That brings us to the other important reason to keep your cadences in Salesforce: it reduces “tool overload.” The more tools you add to your team’s sales stack that they need to learn and maintain, the less effective they become. This is known as “context switching” which can eat up to 80% of a worker’s productive time. Reducing your sales team’s need for context switching between tools helps their brain focus more.

A further advantage of a Salesforce-native cadence solution like Guided Selling by Revenue.io, is that leads and contacts can be added or removed from sequences based on specific field values in Salesforce.

How to Build Cadences in Salesforce with Revenue.io

Unlike other sales tools that require cadence building to live outside of your CRM, Revenue.io keeps your sales activities where they should be… in Salesforce. Guided Selling by Revenue.io streamlines the experience of building a cadence within Salesforce, and adds entrance and exit criteria so sales teams can define which leads or contacts are automatically added to the cadence. 

The ability to define entrance and exit criteria based on any Salesforce field allows you to tailor your cadences automatically to any traits of leads or contacts that make the most sense for your business. Whether considering building inbound or outbound sales cadences, Revenue.io can automatically add prospects depending on whatever criteria you define.

Once someone is added to the cadence, they will appear in the Guided Selling Engage of the owner. The Revenue.io Engage View contains every activity that a rep must perform that day, prioritized by the actions that need to occur first, and the most important. 

Use Salesforce Cadences to Prioritize Team Activities

At the scheduled time of each cadence step or action, it will appear in the salesperson’s Engage View in Salesforce, whether it is making a phone call or connecting with a prospect on LinkedIn. Emails can be scheduled to automatically deploy from the salesperson’s personal email, or scheduled for a manual send for a more personalized touch. Based on Revenue.io call data, you can schedule the phone calls to fit the times of day that your calls are likely to be answered. 

Ultimately, as your sequences are executed over time, you can refine their effectiveness using Salesforce reports & dashboards. 

Multiply your sales effectiveness with Salesforce sales cadences

Since Revenue.io Guided Selling is built directly in Salesforce, all Guided Selling reporting takes place within the CRM as well. Managers can see reports on Guided Selling effectiveness, but they can also see reports on Guided Selling compliance. Guided Selling provides reports on the number of actions performed each day, the type and since Revenue.io also handles the sales calls, the outcome of calls themselves. This is where, as sequences are rolled out, you can begin to identify gaps in your sales team’s performance that you were not able to see previously. Are they sticking with your playbook? Are they meeting the service-level agreements (SLAs) that Marketing has set for inbound leads? 

Tying your cadences to sales outcomes and revenue is the most critical component of a good sequence reporting strategy. Are demos and opportunities increasing as a result of the outreach strategies? If not, what needs to change? If so, how can you expand on that effectiveness?

Sales cadences, especially ones built natively in Salesforce supercharge your sales reps’ prospecting efforts, as they make them more organized, productive, and effective. Guided Selling ensures that the right sales rep contacts the right person through the right channel at the optimal time.

Salesforce Cadences Examples

With the ability to build cadences in Salesforce, there are few limits to what you can be accomplished. You can set up cadences that are optimized for cold outreach, inbound lead response, opportunity follow-up and even customer support. Feel free to steal our own playbook with our five most important examples of Salesforce sequences our team is using to qualify leads, book meetings, build deeper relationships and close deals.

For More

Listen to our podcast on 5 Keys to a Sales Cadence with Gabe Larsen