Once you get a prospect on the phone it’s important to know what to say. But let’s back up a step – how do we actually connect with a prospect in the first place?
One critical component of actually connecting with the people you want to talk to is your calling cadence.
If you make your dials arbitrarily, you’re going about things the wrong way. If you want to succeed then you need to have every single dial you’re going to make planned in advance.
And I don’t mean picking out your dials in the morning before you start calling. You need to have a repeatable process for identifying which prospects need to be called each day.
It’s pretty simple to figure out your cadence. Putting it simply, your cadence is the method by which you move through dials in a strategic way to maximize the number of connections you’re getting. More connections will lead to more conversations with qualified prospects. And more qualified conversations will lead to more opportunities and revenue.
Determining the Optimal Cadence
If you’ve been making dials and running a sales process for some time then you should already have the main numbers that you need to determine an optimal cadence.
These are:
Connect Rate: Which % of dials results in connecting with a living, breathing prospect.
Close Rate: Which % of connections results in the prospect taking the next step in your sales process? (i.e. a demo or follow-up call)
Close Quota: What number of successful phone closes (i.e. demos or follow-up calls) do you need to deliver? You can also think of this as your target for net new opportunities created.
Average Time to Connect: How many dials before the average prospect picks up the phone?
Once you’ve got that information, you’ll be able to figure out the number of dials that need to be made on a daily basis as follows.
Your Average Time to Connect tells you where you;ll see diminishing returns on dials. In most cases, the connect rate drops off significantly after 3-5 dials. So you might have a 10% Connect Rate the first 3 times you dial a prospect, a 5% Connect Rate for dials #4 and #5 and then 1% for each dial after that.
If that’s the case, you can make the case that it’s smarter to spend your time sourcing new prospects once you’ve made 5 dials rather than continuing to pound the phones.
Once you know the upper limit of dials each prospect should receive, you can plan out your cadence.
Dialing Frequency
Let’s assume we found that 5 dials is the optimal number for each prospect, based on our historic Average Time to Connect.
We know that each prospect will receive 5 dials, and so the next thing we need to determine is the Dialing Frequency.
The best way to identify your organization’s optimal Dialing Frequency is by A/B testing different approaches.
You can have your reps spend one month dialing every other day and then the next month dialing once a week. Experiment with different approaches until you find out what works best for your organization.
Dials Per Day
If you’ve been following along, you’ll now have an idea of:
- How many dials each prospect should receive
- The frequency of each dials
Let’s assume that for your organization, it’s:
- 5 dials per prospect
- Dials every other business day
Assuming you only make dials from Monday – Friday, we’re able to see that in 10 business days you’ll run out of dials to make unless you have a fresh stream of prospects to take their place.
Next let’s figure out how many prospects you need in each batch to hit your goals.
We’ll start with how many opportunities we want to generate on a monthly basis.
That can be calculated by:
Connect Rate * Close Rate
By multiplying these, we can see which % of dials will result in an opportunity.
Example:
10% Connect Rate * 50% Close Rate = 5% of dials result in an opportunity.
Since we also know how many opportunities we need to generate, we can divide that number by this percentage to see how many dials need to be made in a period to be successful.
Let’s say you need to deliver 10 demos per month. We just divide this quota of opportunities by the percentage of the time a dial results in an opportunity. That leaves us with our number of target dials:
10 ÷ 5% = 200 dials per month.
So that gives us a target for overall dials that need to be made in a given period.
Putting it All Together
To figure out our cadence, we just need to do a little optimization.
Remember how we figured out that our prospects will drop off in Connect Rate after 5 dials and that the optimal frequency to make dials is every other day? We need to account for that information in our cadence.
We know that each prospect should only get 5 dials, so we can just divide our target dials by 5 to figure out how many prospects we need to contact.
200 dials ÷ 5 dials per prospect = 40 prospects
That leaves us with the following cadence:
We will dial 40 prospects every other day for 10 business days. This will result in 200 dials, which will lead to a connection 10% of the time. Our reps will convert 50% of these connections into 10 qualified opportunities.
What’s your optimal calling cadence? Leave a comment below!