Gryphon Sales Manager Steve Gravallese shares the value of having an established sales process at your organization. Steve shares his sales cadence strategy for his team of SDRs, as well as his experience with challenges, knowing when to adjust the cadence, and enabling his team to achieve peak revenue.

Gryphon: What type of sales cadence do you have in place for your sales team here at Gryphon?

Steve Gravallese: For our SDRs and commercial account executives we follow a specific outreach pattern that is relatively standard across the board for our team. Strategic reps have a bit of a different strategy. In each case, whether you’re working a targeted account or are in an account-based phase, or a “spray and pray” method with the commercial account executives where it’s a bit wider up, those are two very distinct approaches.

The first approach, which is widely used by about 80% of our team, is for commercial account executives or SDRs. That is a 14-day, 11 step process that consists of three emails, two social touches, as well as six phone calls – a mixture of voicemails and trying to catch prospects live.

Upon success, we move those people through the next step of our cadence. We use a typical cadence software, one of the main players out there, which sets up the day-to-day for our reps to make their days more efficient.

We use it for providing call and email framework for folks who aren’t fully onboarded or trained yet; it lets them be effective and start producing immediately out of the gate with lower ramp-up time.

“My reps hit their activity metrics and are responsible knowing that they are being held accountable.” -Steve Gravallese, Gryphon Sales Manager

In order to get those prospects in the cadence, we source at a very high level. The team is tasked with finding three to five new accounts per day. For each account there are five typical personas that we go after: compliance leaders, sales leadership – the first part being sales managers and the second being VPs or SVPs – sales operations titles, and sales training or onboarding titles.

Once you have identified your key titles and key decision makers, and have properly sourced those and added them to the CRM, you can begin to transfer them over into your sales cadence.

Gryphon: Once a rep is seasoned at establishing their cadence, what should they do to ensure they use it to their best advantage?

Gravallese: We tell reps to pay attention to drop-off rate; how many people are falling off the cadence and how quickly. They should make sure they are back-filling those names and meeting – or even exceeding – the minimum required activity for the day. Within the sales cadence, if you aren’t removing people at some point, it can cause a backlog, and the call steps within your day can become over-the-top.

At Gryphon, our KPIs are around 75 phone calls, and half that number for emails or social touches. It amounts to give-or-take 150 touch points per day for our reps.

The sourcing is really what takes up the most time. They should be finding three to five new accounts each day. To have success with the cadence reps should make sure they are identifying the right accounts using customer profiles that make sense – ideal client targets. We use various tools to find the individuals that match the titles we are looking to reach out to.

Gryphon: As a seasoned sales manager, what are some challenges you’ve faced in terms of sales cadence, and how have you adjusted to the patterns of your team or changed things up over time?

Gravallese: With my team we’ve experimented with different approaches trying to improve open rates, clicks, and response rates, whether it be through email or social selling. We’ve adjusted the phone scripts themselves, usually AB testing those with different reps to see what gets the best responses.

Within the cadence itself, we’ll go with A or B to see which messaging or method is resonating more with prospects. Once we have a winner, reps will double-down on that method, and hopefully from there increase conversion ratios and optimize their outreach.

In terms of adjustments, we’ve experimented with automated email timing, even 1- or 5-minute differences. The team is mindful of setting them up to go out after the end of a conversation. We send out heavily personalized emails in the beginning of the sales cycle, moving automation towards the end. We usually use automation for “break-up” emails with prospects.

Gryphon: Do you use any tools to improve the success of your cadence?

Gravallese: The Gryphon System itself is honestly our best asset. Without our product, logging the cadence activity would take all day. It really establishes a process and a path to improvement. I’d say without Gryphon, my reps would need 8-9 hours to go through their cadence, but with Gryphon it takes around 5 hours.

This frees up time for us to train more and get better. We have additional time to spend on higher-value targets as well. My reps hit their activity metrics and are responsible knowing that they are being held accountable.

If there is a lack of effort or lack of training from a manager standpoint, we can start to identify areas of improvement, implement targeted training, and make those changes.

Gryphon: Thanks, Steve, for those insights. It is apparent that a lot of thought, trial, and improvement play a part in your sales strategy. And of course, great to hear that Gryphon plays such an integral part in your day-today as a manager.

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