Follow-up cadence
What is follow-up cadence: follow-up cadence explained
Follow-up cadence is the planned sequence of contact attempts a salesperson or BDC makes on a lead: how many touches, on which channels, spaced across how many days. The defining feature is that it is written before the lead arrives rather than decided in the moment, which is what separates a cadence from a habit.
Also called a follow-up sequence, a contact cadence, a touch pattern, or in older CRMs a work plan.
What does follow-up cadence mean in practice?
Four variables define one. Change any of them and you have a different cadence, so write all four down:
- Attempts. How many contact attempts in total, and how many are calls versus everything else.
- Spacing. The interval between attempts, usually tight in the first 48 hours and widening after.
- Channel mix. Phone, text, email, video, and whether the sequence alternates or repeats one channel.
- Exit rule. What ends the cadence. A booked appointment, an explicit no, or a fixed number of days. Without this one, dead leads absorb the effort forever.
How is follow-up cadence measured?
The cadence itself is a plan, so what you measure is whether it happened. Cadence compliance rate equals touches actually completed, divided by touches the cadence prescribed, times 100.
Two supporting numbers make it readable: time to first touch (minutes from lead arrival to the first genuine attempt) and attempts per contact (how many tries it takes to reach one live conversation).
Compliance is a process check, so read it at team level and by day of the week. A cadence that runs at 80 percent Monday to Thursday and 30 percent on Saturdays does not have a design problem. It has a staffing problem on the busiest day of the week, and no amount of rewriting the sequence will touch it.
Follow-up cadence: a worked example
A store runs a 21-day cadence of 12 touches per lead: six calls, four texts or emails, and two video messages. In a month with 300 new leads, that prescribes 3,600 touches. The CRM logs 2,040 of them.
Compliance is 56.7 percent. Before anyone redesigns the cadence, note what that number means: nearly half of it was never run. The store is about to conclude that its cadence failed when what actually happened is that its cadence was not attempted.
Why the first hour outweighs the next three weeks
Cadence design tends to obsess over touches seven through twelve, and the evidence says the money sits in the first few minutes. The Lead Response Management study, led by Dr James Oldroyd at MIT Sloan with InsideSales.com, analysed three years of data across six companies, more than 15,000 web-generated leads and over 100,000 call attempts. It found the odds of qualifying a lead fell 21-fold when the first response stretched from five minutes to 30.
That is not a dealership dataset, and the direction is not in dispute. A twelve-touch cadence that starts four hours late is a worse cadence than a six-touch one that starts in five minutes.
How follow-up cadence gets gamed or misread
- Logging a touch that was not an attempt. Opening the record, dialling and hanging up before it rings, sending a template nobody read. Compliance hits target and the customer was never contacted.
- Front-loading to hit the count. Six attempts crammed into 48 hours satisfies the number and burns the lead. Spacing is part of the cadence, not a suggestion.
- Channel monotony. Six voicemails is one channel used six times, not six touches. The customer who ignored the first has already told you about the next five.
- Counting attempts instead of conversations. Attempts are an input. Contact rate and lead to appointment ratio are the outputs, and a cadence with rising attempts and flat contact is getting louder, not better.
- No exit rule. Without one, the BDC spends its capacity on leads that closed elsewhere three weeks ago.
- One cadence for every source. An inbound phone enquiry and a third-party marketplace lead are at different stages of intent and should not be worked identically.
What a cadence should be judged on
Not touch count, and not compliance either. Compliance only tells you whether the plan ran. Judge the cadence on contact rate, on appointments set, and on how many of those appointments survive to the day, because a customer who booked after a real conversation is far more likely to arrive than one who booked to end the sequence. That link to no-shows is the part most cadence reviews skip.
