Sales Cadence

A sales cadence is a predefined sequence of outreach touches — emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, voicemails — spaced across a fixed number of days to systematically pursue a prospect until they respond, opt out, or hit the end of the sequence. Most B2B SaaS teams run cadences of 8 to 14 touches over 14 to 21 days, mixing two or three channels. The cadence is the unit of work an SDR or AE executes against a prospect list; the sales engagement platform (Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, HubSpot Sequences) is the system that runs it.

How Sales Cadences Are Structured

A cadence has four variables: touch count, channel mix, day spacing, and exit conditions. A standard outbound cadence might look like: Day 1 email plus call plus LinkedIn view, Day 3 email, Day 5 call plus voicemail, Day 8 email, Day 10 call, Day 13 LinkedIn message, Day 15 break-up email. That is 10 touches across 4 channels over 15 days. The two-touches-per-day rule keeps SDRs from torching a contact's inbox while preserving the "did we actually try" cover that managers want to see in the CRM.

The math underneath is unflattering. Cold email reply rates hover at 1-3% for unpersonalized blasts and 5-15% for tight ICP work. Cold call connect rates run 1-3%, with maybe a 20% conversation-to-meeting rate among connects. Stacking channels compounds the odds — a prospect who ignores three emails sometimes picks up the fourth call because the name is suddenly familiar.

A Worked Sales Cadence Example

A 12-touch, 14-day cadence run against a list of 500 cold leads at a typical SaaS company yields roughly: 15 replies (3%), 6 positive responses (1.2%), 4 booked meetings (0.8%), 2 Sales Accepted Leads. At a $30K ACV, the SDR needs to run this volume about every 10 days to feed one AE running a $1.2M quota. That is the brutal arithmetic that drives the SDR factory.

When Sales Teams Use Sales Cadences

VPs of Sales Development own cadence design and library hygiene. RevOps tracks which cadences produce meetings versus unsubscribes. SDR managers coach on adherence — did the rep complete all 12 steps before marking the prospect "not interested"? The metric most often cited in QBRs is touches per opportunity created, which proxies for cadence efficiency. Pipeline generation targets cascade backward into how many leads need to enter how many cadences per week.

Common Sales Cadence Gaming Patterns

Cadences get gamed at the touch level. Reps mark calls as "left voicemail" without dialing, send three-word LinkedIn messages to count as a touch, and complete email steps with a single generic template that never gets read. Activity dashboards turn green; the meeting rate does not move. The fix most engagement platforms shipped is connecting the dialer to the activity record, but voicemail-ghosting and skimmable-template syndrome stay rampant.

The deeper dysfunction is cadence inflation. When reply rates drop, the instinct is to add touches — go from 10 to 14, from 14-day to 21-day. This degrades deliverability because spam filters notice the same template hitting the same domains repeatedly, and it kills the SDR's capacity to personalize. The teams that pull out of the decline shrink the cadence and tighten the ICP list, not the other way around.

The cadence also tells you nothing about what happens after a meeting is booked. A team can have a 4% cadence-to-meeting rate and a 5% meeting-to-opportunity rate and still drown in pipeline that never closes. Cadence efficiency is upstream of revenue, not synonymous with it.