Space your touches across channels so prospects keep seeing you without finding you a nuisance.
Pull up the last prospect you followed up with and write down the day and channel of each touch you sent. Then compare your list with these two sellers, who both follow up on the same prospect.
The first seller sends an email on Monday, another email on Tuesday, a WhatsApp on Wednesday and a call on Thursday, and comes across as a stalker. The second sends one email and waits a month, and is forgotten. Neither gets a reply. The first followed up too often and the second too rarely.
What went wrong for both is cadence, which is the spacing of your touches over time. Lesson 6.1, "Why one message is never enough", covered why you need several touches. The rest of these notes cover where to place them.
People have favourite channels. Some live in their inbox. Some never check email but answer the phone. Some are on LinkedIn every morning. A sequence on a single channel only reaches the people who prefer that channel, so mix your channels. A typical mix is email, phone call and LinkedIn. Add WhatsApp only when it fits the rules and etiquette in module 5, meaning the person gave you the number for that purpose or a mutual contact introduced you.
Switching channels also makes each touch feel less repetitive. A call after an email is a new kind of contact, while a fourth email in a row is more of the same.
Each channel has its own rules. Before any marketing call or text to a Singapore number, run the Do Not Call check from lesson 5.1. Check your list before the sequence starts, not on the day of the call.
Space your early touches a few working days apart. That is close enough for the buyer to link your second touch to the first, and far enough that it does not feel like pressure. Early on, the buyer may simply have missed your message, and a quick second touch catches people who meant to reply.
As the sequence goes on, widen the gaps. If the buyer is still silent after several touches, the timing is probably wrong, and contacting them more often will only annoy them. Wider gaps give their situation time to change.
Every touch should also add something new, as lesson 6.1 requires. Avoid weekends too. Choosing your start day carefully is one way to do that.
Mei (an invented example) sells bookkeeping services. Her prospect, Jason, has just opened a new outlet, which is his trigger. Her cadence has five touches over three weeks. Days count from the first touch, and she starts on a Tuesday so that no touch lands on a weekend.
Day 1, Tuesday: email. This is her four-part email from lesson 4.1, built around Jason's trigger. Day 3, Thursday: phone call. She uses the four-part opener from lesson 3.1 and refers back to the email. If she has to leave a voicemail, it is one sentence plus her number. Day 8, Tuesday: LinkedIn. She sends a connection request with a short note, or comments on a recent post if they are already connected. Day 14, Monday: email. She sends something useful, such as her short list of documents banks commonly ask for when a business applies for a loan, plus a simpler ask. Day 21, Monday: email. This is the closing message.
The gaps between her touches are 2 days, then 5, 6 and 7, so they widen as the sequence goes on. Each touch adds one new thing, in this order: a trigger, a voice, a face, a resource and a clean ending.
The last touch is a closing message. Its job is to make replying easy, even with a no, and to leave the door open. It can get a reply when earlier touches did not, because it asks for nothing and lets the buyer off the hook.
Mei's closing message to Jason says she has sent a few notes about bookkeeping for the new outlet without hearing back, that silence usually means the timing is wrong, and that she will stop here. It invites him to reply if month-end becomes a headache later in the year, and says she will pick it up then.
The closing message can lead to three outcomes. Some buyers reply "thanks, not now", which is useful information. Some reply that the timing is actually good. Those who stay silent were treated politely, so they remain open to contact if a new trigger appears.
After the closing message, mark the prospect as lost in your CRM with the reason "no reply, timing", and set a next step to check back in a few months. Lesson 6.3, "The minimum CRM fields worth tracking", shows how to record a lost reason and a next step.
Treat your first cadence as a guess. Test it the same way you tested emails in lesson 4.4, "Write and test three cold emails": change one thing at a time and watch the reply rate.
Change only one gap or element per test. If you shorten the gap between touches two and three and also swap the LinkedIn touch for a call, you cannot tell which change made the difference. Run the new cadence on a similar group of prospects for a few weeks, then compare its replies with the old cadence's.
Darren sells to new parents. When he tested his cadence, he got more replies when his second touch came a week after the first than when it came two days after. The likely reason is that new parents need time to get to their messages. His result applies to his own buyers, and yours may respond differently.
The activity below asks you to draw your own five-touch cadence over three weeks, with the channel and day for each touch and the one new thing each touch adds.
Sketch a five-touch cadence over three weeks. For each touch, write the channel, the day, and the one new thing it brings.
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