Outbound cadence: how many times to call back before you give up

How many times should you call a prospect back before letting them go? The question comes up in almost every demo, and my answer is a bit of a letdown: it depends on your industry.

That’s not a way of dodging the subject. Two teams selling different things to different roles have no reason to end up with the same cadence.

So you won’t find that number here. What you will find is what that number depends on in your case.

Why ready-made cadences don’t transfer

You’ve already come across those ready-to-use sequences: so many touches over so many days, in a precise order. They circulate well because they’re easy to copy.

The problem is in what doesn’t get published around them. A cadence is the result of a precise context: a market, a target role, and a list whose quality is known. That context stays with whoever built it, and all you’re left with is the numbers.

Take a decision that goes through a committee once a quarter. It won’t move faster because you call more. Conversely, on a purchase that a single person settles within the week, a sequence spread over six weeks arrives after the matter has already been handled elsewhere.

What actually decides your cadence

Your market’s decision cycle sets how long it’s reasonable to work an account. As long as the buying window isn’t open, you’re calling to be there when it opens. That means keeping at it, but less often.

The role you target and the state of your list come next. An operations manager who spends the day in a warehouse can’t be reached the way a marketing manager sitting in front of a screen can; some roles are only reachable at specific moments of the day, and badly placed attempts teach you almost nothing. Look at your calling windows. And if part of your numbers land on a switchboard or on someone who left the company, what you’re measuring is the state of your list. Automatic filtering of voicemails and invalid numbers removes part of the noise.

That leaves the size of your addressable market, the one people talk about least. If your target fits in a few hundred accounts, you can’t afford to give up early: there’s nothing else to call behind it. An account you set aside won’t be replaced, and the time spent calling it back wouldn’t have gone anywhere else anyway.

If your target counts in the tens of thousands of companies, the math flips. A team makes a finite number of calls in a day, and that number gets split between prospects already touched and those nobody has called yet. Every extra attempt on the same person is someone you don’t call that day.

What it looks like in the tool

At Ubic, the cadence is set list by list, with the progressive pause.

A prospect who doesn’t pick up gets frozen. They leave the rotation, then become callable again after the delay you set for the current phase. If they don’t pick up the next time either, they move on to the next phase and the delay gets longer. You also decide how the cycle ends: loop on the last phase, remove the prospect with a status that goes to your CRM, or switch to an SMS or a voice message.

The prospect’s record shows the current phase and the return date, and the dialer shows how many prospects are in a cycle. That keeps you from starting a session on the tail end of a list without knowing it.

The automations page shows a cycle with two days, then seven. Those values illustrate the shape of the cycle. Don’t read them as the cadence we recommend: we don’t publish one, for lack of one that would hold for every list.

One limit, while we’re at it. The mechanism handles the spacing of attempts; it doesn’t decide when a prospect no longer deserves another call.

Where email and LinkedIn fit

The call is the channel where you know the same day whether the topic exists for that prospect. Email and LinkedIn are for something else: they change the way the call starts.

An email sent the day before changes the first sentence: “I wrote to you yesterday” replaces a cold start. A LinkedIn profile visit does the same job in a lighter way. The order is detailed in multichannel: the order that changes everything.

It doesn’t shorten your cadence, though: the number of attempts stays the same.

Pulling your cadence out of your own numbers

On a single list, count by hand how many conversations happen on the 1st attempt, the 2nd, the 3rd. The attempt number where it stops is your answer, and it only holds for that list.

Segment by list and by target role. An average computed over your whole pipeline mixes a CFO at a small business with a technical director at a large account. The reports segment by list and by time slot: the target role is yours to separate by building distinct lists. And compare the same list over the same time range, with a single variable changed.

Give it time. One week on a single list won’t settle anything, especially if the list is small.

On our side, more than 600,000 calls have been made with Ubic. Our averages say nothing about your industry.

If you have to start somewhere, take your most worked list and run that count on it. Set the number of phases in your cycle to that attempt number: beyond it, you’re calling into the void. The cadence you get will be debatable, but you’ll be able to correct it the following month with your own numbers.

Frequently asked questions

How many attempts before giving up on a prospect?

There’s no number that holds everywhere. It depends mostly on your market’s decision cycle and on how reachable the role you’re calling is. The size of your addressable market weighs in too: if your target fits in a few hundred accounts, you keep trying longer, for lack of an alternative.

Should the cadence differ from one list to another?

Yes, and that’s why the progressive pause is set per list at Ubic. A purchased cold list and a list of strategic accounts don’t have the same callback rhythm, nor the same tolerance for persistence.

What happens to a prospect at the end of the cycle?

Three possible exits, and you’re the one who chooses. The exit with a status synced to your CRM is the one that keeps another SDR from calling them back in three months without knowing what happened.

How do I know if I’m stopping too early?

Run the count on a list that’s already been worked all the way through. If conversations were still coming out at the last attempt you allow yourself, add a phase to your cycle on that list and see what it gives the following month.