Build a sales cadence, day by day.

What is a sales cadence?

A sales cadence is a planned run of touches to one prospect, on set channels and at set intervals, that ends when they reply or when the last touch goes out. Most cold cadences run two to three weeks, with the touches close together at the start and further apart toward the end.

Cadence and sequence are close to the same thing. Strictly, the cadence is the timing and the rhythm, and the sequence is the steps themselves, but most sales tools use the two words for one idea. Salesforce, for one, calls the feature in its Sales Engagement app Cadences (Salesforce Trailhead, read on 23 October 2026).

So when someone says "a 2 week cadence", they mean the touches run over two weeks, 14 calendar days. With weekends off that is 10 working days, enough for about 5 touches at least two days apart.

How many touches, over how many days?

The guides that rank for this question agree on a range, not a number. Highspot's guide (updated 30 September 2026) puts a cold cadence at 6 to 8 touches across email, phone and social, spread over two to three weeks, and an inbound one at 8 to 12 touches over 10 to 15 business days. Pipedrive's guide (updated 23 September 2026) gives the same 6 to 8 over two to three weeks.

Cognism's guide (updated 15 April 2026) goes longer. It quotes Morgan J Ingram for a cadence of 17 to 21 days and Florin Tatulea for 8 to 12 touches. Both are practitioners' advice rather than measured results.

For email alone, Belkins studied 7,530,489 emails it sent for its clients over 12 months of 2025 (updated 26 June 2026). It puts the useful range at 3 to 5 email steps, and when three emails draw no engagement it suggests moving to LinkedIn rather than adding more email.

The builder starts at 7 touches over 3 weeks for LinkedIn and email: the middle of the cold range, without calls. If you run email only, keep to the lower counts, closer to Belkins' 3 to 5 emails. With Email only, the builder starts at 5.

How far apart: busy early, then wider

Yesware looked at 10 million email threads (updated 26 February 2024) and found the cadence with the most replies ran about three weeks, with follow-ups around days 3, 7, 11, 15, 19 and 22, so three to four days apart. The post calls that six touches while listing six follow-ups after the first email, and it does not say which period or which senders the threads came from, so treat it as a rough guide.

Cognism's example opens close together, with a LinkedIn request with no note on day 1 and an email on day 2, and ends with a goodbye email on day 21. The same guide notes that teams in EMEA and APAC need fewer touches, and that three touches on day 1 can feel intrusive in some regions, DACH above all.

Salesforce's guide to email cadences (21 November 2025) names the other side of it: messages sent too close together can read as aggressive, and if you wait too long the momentum fades.

The builder follows that shape. Every gap gets its minimum first, two days, or one day for the email after a connection request. The days left over go mostly to the later gaps, so the first week is busy and the last touches are spread out.

Mixing LinkedIn and email

With both channels, the connection request goes first and an email follows the next day. From then on the plan has to branch, because LinkedIn Help says you can only message your connections. Reaching anyone else takes InMail, which needs a Premium subscription, or a message request to a coworker or a fellow group member (read on 23 October 2026).

So each LinkedIn touch after the request goes to the people who accepted, and the people who did not accept get an email in its place. The builder prints those touches as two rows, one for each group. A reply on either channel ends the plan for that person on both.

Should the request carry a note? Belkins' LinkedIn data, drawn from 112,005 invite-based sequences across 33 client projects, shows a small trade. Requests with a note were accepted a little less often, 25.31% against 27.56% without one, but among the people who accepted, 8.18% replied against 5.28%.

If you add a note, keep it short. LinkedIn Help allows up to 200 characters, and limits how many requests a member without Premium can send with a note each month: three on that help page, and five on an older one (both read on 23 October 2026).

LinkedIn publishes no weekly number for invitations. Its help page on the limit says only that reaching it can stop you sending invitations for a time, and that this "typically lasts one week".

What each touch should say

Give each touch one job and one idea. Read in order, the touches should make an arc: why them, something useful, proof, a clear ask, and a short close.

Salesforce's first example is that arc in email over two weeks. Day 1 names a pain point common to the prospect's role, day 4 builds trust with a customer story or a number, day 7 offers a more useful resource, day 10 asks directly for the meeting, and day 14 is a final note that leaves the door open.

Highspot's sample ends the same way, with a break-up email on day 10 that says this is the last message for now.

The builder gives each touch one of these jobs, in this order:

• The opener: why them, and the problem you solve for their role, with one soft question
• The follow‑up: one new detail and the same question
• Value: one useful idea or resource, with no ask beyond a reply
• Proof: one customer result in a line or two
• A new angle: a different problem you solve for their role
• The ask: 15 minutes, with two specific times
• The close: say it is your last note, and leave the door open

When to stop

Stop at the first reply, on any channel, and stop both channels at once. A person who answered your email should not get the LinkedIn message the plan had for the next day.

Stop too at an opt-out, at a bounce, and after the closing note. Up to that point every follow-up earns its place: in Belkins' email data the first email drew 41.4% of replies and steps 2 to 6 drew the other 58.6%, with step 3 alone behind 35.6% of the meetings email booked. Past step 5 the volume falls sharply.

Volume has a limit of its own. Under Google's sender rules for Gmail, in force since 1 February 2024 (read on 23 October 2026), every sender must keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%, with 0.1% as the target, and anyone sending 5,000 or more messages a day must offer one-click unsubscribe on marketing messages.

If someone never answers, a later touch is a new cadence, not a longer one. Highspot's sample comes back once, on day 30, with a light re-engagement touch.

Three sales cadence examples

These are the builder's own plans for three common shapes, with weekends off and day 1 on a Monday. Use one as a template, or change the channels, the length and the touches in the builder above and copy your own.