I have been using ActiveCampaign for a few years and I am pleased with the functionality and the appealing price point. Recently, I was asked if a sales cadence contact flow recommended on the HubSpot blog could be implemented in ActiveCampaign. I reviewed the flow of activities and I was convinced that this was certainly do-able. I’ll admit it, I do love a challenge and I set out to create a Sales Cadence ActiveCampaign Automation using the HubSpot article as my guide.
The ActiveCampaign automation that I came up with requires 10 tags. The whole goal of the automation is to have the contact respond to an email. Once they respond, the automation is ended and they are sent to a separate automation.
I created an email template for the automation. It includes one paragraph with links that allow the contact to, either stop the email sequence completely, or stop the email sequence, but move them to a Remind Me Later About Your Services automation. This latter automation will email contacts when there are special events coming up.
Part 1 – Start Sales Cadence Automation
Tagging a contact with the tag Sales Cadence: Begin, will trigger the automation. The first 2 steps create a deal for the contact and an Email task in the deal. The automation waits for the email to be created and sent. A secondary automation is triggered when the Email task is complete that tags the contact with the tag Sales Cadence: Intro Email Sent. Once the contact is tagged with this tag, they proceed to the next step.
Part 2 – Prepared Emails in Sales Candence Automation
These steps are self explanatory. The contact waits two (2) days and at 10am the contact’s timezone, we send the second email and then two (2) days later the third email is sent out.
Part 3 – Warm Call
Here the contact waits two (2) more days before being sent one more short and sweet email. If still no reply from the contact, we schedule a call to take place two days later. Once the call is marked complete, the contact waits another two (2) day period before another prepared email is sent out from the automation.
According to Carlos A. Monteiro, the gentleman who authored this process, this is a good time to send a second very personal email with an article or photos or some other link that is appropriate to win over the sale. This personal email will target a need the contact may have discussed on their blog or in their social media feed that you discovered while following them over the course of this sales process.
After the Article/Link/Photo Email is sent, we schedule another call to be added to the deal to take place in two (2) days.
Part 4 – Last Chance For The Win
We wait two (2) more days and send the last pre-authored email from the automation. Here the contact will wait for an additional ten (10) days in our hopes they respond to any of the previous emails. If they don’t respond, they are tagged as lost, the deal is marked as lost and the deal is moved to the lost stage of the Sales Cadence pipeline.
Part 5 – Goal Achieved Sales Cadence Automation
This very last part of the automation directs the actions taken on those contacts that achieve the goal we set – Contact Replied to Email.
If at any time during this automation the contact responds to an email, the contact has achieved the goal and is immediately moved to this section of the automation bypassing all other steps.
Here the contact is tagged with the tag Sales Cadence: Has Replied, the deal is moved to the To Contact stage in the pipeline and the deal status is marked as Won.
In our example, the contact is added to the next automation where we schedule an appointment to review their requirements. However, your process may add the contact to a nurture series or suspend all automations while you work through the order process. The next stage depends completely upon your sales processes and procedures.
I was pleased that I was able to meet the challenge and create the Hubspot recommended Sales Cadence using ActiveCampaign Automation. I was also happy that ActiveCampaign has the flexibility and functionality to meet the needs of a mixed channel sales process.
