Sales cadence software will help you scale up your sales outreach and start conversations with more prospects and sales leads.

However, it can be hard to figure out which sales cadence tool is right for you and your company with so many options on the market.

In this article, we’ll show you some of the best options out there.

  1. Features to Look for In Your Sales Cadence Software

  2. Best Sales Cadence Software for Automating Your Outreach

  3. 8 Alternative Sales Cadence Software & Tools

  4. Frequently Asked Questions about Sales Cadence Tools

Let’s dive straight in.

Features to Look for In Your Sales Cadence Software

Every tool we’re going to look at has different value propositions and unique features.

However, there are some essential features that we’ve found almost every person and team running outreach campaigns needs. Here are some to look for in your search:

  • Easy email personalization using attributes

  • Automatic follow-ups to engage with prospects that don’t reply

  • Email metrics and tracking to understand your performance

  • Integrations with other tools in your day-to-day workflow

  • Allows you to bring multiple team members in and collaborate

While there might be other specific features each tool offers, these are some of the core ones to look out for that our users get value from.

Best Sales Cadence Software for Personalized Outreach

QuickMail: Book 4x more meetings than with other sales cadence software

Run personalized sales cadences to cold prospects and automatically follow up. Best-in-class integrations with email warm-up tools to ensure your emails always land in the inbox. The only cold email platform with a completely free plan.

Send Personalized Email Cadences on Autopilot

QuickMail lets you automate your outreach with personalized sales email cadences. You can use attributes to insert personalized text into any email, such as:

  • Your recipient’s name and company name

  • A custom opening line or P.S. note at the end of your email

  • A reference to their job title or company activities

Email personalization is table stakes today, so you need a tool that makes it easy to add.

If your potential customer doesn’t reply, QuickMail can automatically follow-up to ensure you stay top of mind.

Native Integration With Deliverability Tools to Ensure Your Email Cadences Always Land in the Inbox

If your email cadence doesn’t land in your prospect’s inbox, you won’t get results.

QuickMail has email deliverability tools integrated that ensure your emails always reach the primary inbox, including a native integration with MailFlow, a free email warmup tool.

Once you add your inbox (or multiple inboxes) to the MailFlow Auto Warmer, it will start sending emails to other inboxes in our email warm-up network. 

The engagement your email address is getting will show ESPs that you’re a trustworthy sender, and they’ll be unlikely to flag your emails as spam.

You can track how your emails are being delivered in the MailFlow Auto Warmer report and make adjustments to improve your deliverability rates.

Bring Your Whole Team onto the Platform

Most sales cadence software is made for individuals. QuickMail works perfectly if you’re a solo salesperson, but it's also optimized to work for growing teams of sales reps who need to collaborate.

You can add as many new inboxes to your QuickMail account as you need, and even segment your account by different clients or accounts that you’re working with. This means you won’t need to log in and out of different accounts all day and campaign management will be simple.

You can also choose to send campaigns from either one or multiple inboxes, using inbox rotation.

If you want to scale the sending volume on a campaign, all you need to do is add a new inbox, rather than copy-paste the entire campaign into a new account.

The integrated audit log will also track which team members take actions on the account, so it’s easy to track changes to campaigns, email copy, or see who launched your latest email cadences.

Automate Every Part of the Process

QuickMail is made to help you scale your outreach without needing to spend hours managing the process every day.

You can automate almost every part of your workflow, including things like:

  • Pulling in new prospects from a Google Sheet

  • Sending emails to a specific number of prospects per week automatically

  • Follow-up with people who don’t reply automatically

  • Send notifications to your team in Slack when you receive a reply

  • AB tests different sales cadences to find the most effective sales cadence variations

QuickMail also integrates with Zapier, so you can build any custom sales automation or workflow that you need in your business and have it running within minutes.

If you ever need help improving your workflow, our support team is there to help.

Pricing: Send 3,000 emails per month completely free with QuickMail’s Lite plan. Generous paid plans from $49/mo.

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 (69 reviews)

Capterra rating: 4.8 out of 5 (25 reviews)

What our customers on G2 and Capterra are saying:

  • “We're running email outreach via 50+ inboxes (30+ customers), and QuickMail works exceptionally well, with no hiccups or issues. We love the built-in warmup features and all the integration capabilities.”

  • “The deliverability is amazing, we are getting 40-80% open rates and response rates and booking more meetings than we can handle.”

  • “Everything, the intuitiveness of the platform, the UX is great, easy once you know how to use it. QuickMail has saved me days upon weeks upon months of manually sending out emails, and now I can focus on running my business, managing my clients, sales/growth.”

  • By send volume - we book 4X more meetings in QuickMail than our previous platform. The way lists are organized, it's so much simpler to run campaigns at scale and be nimble when you need to make pivots. I've looked at and tested a lot of platforms and nothing holds a candle to QuickMail.

Key Features:

  • Send personalized email cadences to cold prospects

  • Automate repetitive tasks in your outreach workflow

  • Add as many inboxes as you need and collaborate with your team

  • Integrates with all of the sales and marketing tools you’re already using

8 Alternative Sales Cadence Software & Tools

1. HubSpot Sales Hub: Manage your entire sales process in one place 

Powerful sales platform that lets you send email cadences to nurture sales leads in your pipeline.

HubSpot is one of the leading sales platforms, and part of that is due to the powerful sales cadence tools that you can use to engage your leads and nurture them into customers.

HubSpot isn’t made for cold email, so you can’t reach out to cold prospects. However, you can use it in sync with QuickMail. First, you can reach out and start conversations with your leads using QuickMail.

Once your sales leads are in your pipeline, you can use HubSpot to build email cadences designed to turn those leads into customers.

Because HubSpot is used by so many companies, there are hundreds of integrations you can tap into to improve your workflow.

You can see detailed analytics on your contacts, which show you how engaged your leads are at each step of your sales cadence so you can optimize and improve your sales process.

Pricing: Free plan available, paid plans from $45 per month. Pricing increases quickly the more team members you need.

Pros:

  • Create multi-step HubSpot cadences that adapt based on prospect actions

  • Reusable email templates that can be personalized with merge tags

  • Integrations with hundreds of other outreach and marketing tools

Cons:

  • Customers on G2 mention that the email sequence tools have limitations – such as limits on the number of contacts per sequence – which can slow down their work

  • User reviews on Capterra mention that it gets expensive if your company is growing quickly, as new features typically come with a cost

2. Gmass: Send email cadences from your Gmail inbox

Email marketing and sales cadence service that works inside your Gmail account.

Gmass is a tool that works inside your Gmail account and adds new functionality, including the ability to send personalized email cadences to cold prospects.

The whole email cadence creation process is managed inside Gmail, and you can send your cadences to multiple recipients at once, either added manually or taken from a Google Sheet of prospects. Cadences can be sent out immediately, or scheduled to send at a future time.

Like in QuickMail, Gmass can automatically follow up with contacts that don’t reply to give your outreach the best chance of receiving a response.

It’s a useful tool for anyone that wants to have a way to send automated email cadences to sales leads or customers but doesn’t want to spend time onboarding into a new standalone tool.

Pricing: Starts at $19.95 per month for unlimited email tracking and campaign setup. To send multi-step sales cadences, plans start at $29.95 per inbox per month.

Pros:

  • Personalize every email you send with mail merges to increase response rates

  • Automatically follow-up with people that don’t reply (available on Premium plan and above)

  • Send more emails than Gmail typically allows you to

Cons:

Want to see how Gmass compares to QuickMail? Check out the main differences here.

3. Yesware: Lightweight platform to send multichannel cadences

Sales cadence software that works with Gmail and Outlook and syncs email activity into your CRM.

Yesware is a powerful sales cadence platform that lets you manage your outreach process.

Once your sales cadence is ready, you can schedule it to send and Yesware will send it to all of the prospects in your list. If they don’t reply, you can automatically follow up. On top of regular email cadences, you can use Yesware to manage multi-channel outreach campaigns – you can set reminders for you to send someone an InMail on LinkedIn, or make a cold call.

If you’re going to use cold calling in your cadence, make sure to use a phone number validator to ensure the number in your prospect records is correct. Otherwise, you’ll waste time calling numbers that don’t exist.

Like in QuickMail, you can track how each prospect engages with your email, and you’ll see metrics like open rate, clickthrough rate, reply rate, and more.

Pricing: Starts from $15 per seat per month for basic email tracking. Plans including sales cadences start at $35 per seat per month.

Pros:

  • Lets you personalize your sales email cadences with mail merges and attributes

  • Integrates with your Salesforce CRM and other popular sales tools

  • Track email link clicks and metrics to judge the success of your email cadences

Cons:

  • Users on G2 say that it’s hard to compare campaign results against each other and reporting could be more detailed

  • Some customers on Capterra mention that it can send too many notifications in your email client, which can be distracting

Yesware vs. QuickMail: How do they compare? Read the comparison here.

4. Outreach: Enterprise platform for companies with large teams of sales reps

Sales cadence and engagement platform made for sales teams at large enterprise companies.

Outreach is one of the best sales cadence tools for large teams at enterprise-level companies that need to be able to send email cadences and run account-based marketing campaigns from one platform.

You can manage all of your sales activities inside the platform, so it’s ideal for anyone that needs a complete hub for all of their team’s activities.

Outreach lets you create personalized email cadences that you can send out to sales leads, with automatic follow-ups. The platform collects buyer engagement signals and notifies you when a prospect is showing signs that they’re either nearing being purchase-ready or are showing signs that they are becoming disinterested.

All-in-all, it’s a powerful sales cadence platform but is probably overkill unless you work at a large organization.

Pricing: Available on request

Pros:

  • Build multi-channel outreach cadences that your whole sales team can collaborate on

  • Run account-based marketing campaigns to target multiple decision-makers at one company

  • Integrates with a range of other sales tools

Cons:

  • Outreach users on G2 say that they have concerns about email deliverability 

  • Customers on G2 mention that the Salesforce integration is slow, so it takes time to transfer data between the two platforms

5. Salesloft: Sales engagement platform with email and phone cadence features

All-in-one sales tool that includes the ability to send multi-step and multi-channel email cadences.

Similar to Outreach, Salesloft is a powerful sales engagement platform but designed for large teams. That means it comes with a high price-per-seat and might have features that the average user doesn’t need.

However, if you want to send prospecting cadences out and engage with your target buyers, it’s still an excellent option.

You can build multi-step campaigns that send on a schedule you set, and every reply or action that your prospect takes will be logged automatically into your CRM.

Salesloft even includes a coaching tool that provides suggestions on what actions you need to take next based on a prospect engaging with you and your team. It’s a solid choice for your sales cadence needs, but as mentioned above, is best for larger companies.

Pricing: Available on request

Pros:

  • Send automated sales cadences to reach out to cold prospects

  • Automatically sync all sales activity with your CRM

  • AI-based sales coaching that makes suggestions on the best next actions to take

Cons:

  • Customers mention in their Capterra reviews that the platform runs slowly which can hurt sales productivity

  • Users on G2 say that they struggle to export data from Salesloft into their other sales tools

6. PersistIQ: Good platform for sending outbound email cadences

Sales cadence software for small teams needing simple but effective sales cadence automation.

PersistIQ is a sales cadence tool for small teams that want to start experimenting with outreach.

The platform has a Chrome Extension for LinkedIn prospecting that lets you export leads from LinkedIn into your prospect list in PersistIQ. When you have a list ready to reach out to, you can build the sales cadence software to create a personalized and engaging campaign.

PersistIQ also includes a spreadsheet-style database that helps you manage your sales leads and get an overview of the number of replies, opens, and clicks that your campaigns are generating.

Like with QuickMail, you can add extra tasks to your campaigns, so if email isn’t working, you can ensure your team knows what other actions to take, such as making a cold call or sending a LinkedIn message to a prospect.

Pricing: From $59 per user per month for 300 daily emails. For 600 emails per day, a sales dialer, and Salesforce integration, pricing starts at $99 per user per month.

Pros:

  • LinkedIn extension to extract emails from profiles and add them to a prospect list

  • Send automated email cadences with multiple follow-ups

  • Track all email activity and results in a database to understand performance

Cons:

  • PersistIQ customer reviews on G2 say that the set up process requires some IT admin to get started

  • Users on Capterra highlight that the email cadence reporting is limited, so it’s hard to make data-driven decisions

7. Vanillasoft: Keeps your team focused on high-priority leads

All-in-one sales cadence and CRM platform to improve sales team productivity

Vanillasoft is a sales engagement platform for inside sales reps. It can help you create B2B sales cadences across email, phone, and text. 

Part of what makes the platform effective is that Vanillasoft also includes tools to help you with your sales prospecting, including a B2B database that you can use to identify qualified potential customers. As well as that, there’s a CRM to help you track conversations through your sales pipeline

One unique element is lead routing. This will show you which leads are most engaged and advise your sales reps to email or call them. It’s a great way to keep your team focused and productive at the same time.

You can easily add cold calls to your sales cadence automation, and Vanillasoft’s power dialer can call through your prospect list in a few clicks, and record the calls so you can review the conversation afterwards.

All-in-all, it’s a great platform for building multichannel sales cadences.

Pricing: Starts at $80 per user per month. Full pricing is available after a demo.

Pros:

  • Useful to have all of your most important sales cadence tools for email, calling, and pipeline management in one place

  • Add notes to your conversations in order to track vital information about different leads

  • One-click sales dialer means it’s simple to call through a long list of prospects

Cons:

  • Some users on G2 mention that the email cadences aren't as powerful as they could be, even though the cold-calling features are robust

  • Other G2 reviewers highlight that customer support can be lacking

8. Freshsales: Manage your sales pipeline and nurture leads

A CRM and sales cadence automation platform to nurture existing leads into customers 

Freshsales is a CRM and sales management platform. 

Freshsales isn’t made for outbound sales cadences – for that, you’ll need a cold email cadence tool like QuickMail. Where it shines is the lead nurturing process.

After a prospect replies to a cold email you’ve sent, you can create a new record for them in Freshsales to continue the conversation and nurture them into a customer.

You can build as many sequences as you need to match the different stages in your sales cycle. For example, you could create a sequence to send leads after your first demo call, or have an automated sequence consisting of emails and text messages that get sent if someone doesn't sign a proposal within five days. 

Pricing: From $15 per user per month for basic sales sequences. From $39 per user per month if you want smart workflows.

Pros:

  • Manage communication with leads by automating your follow up emails, phone calls, SMS, and more

  • Lots of options to eliminate manual work by adding automation to your outbound sales cadence workflow

  • Effective for teams that want to centralize their sales touchpoints and communication

Cons:

  • Users on Capterra mention that the support can be lacking as it’s a large company with multiple products

  • Customers on G2 mention that some features aren’t as powerful as they could be, but this is a trade-off because the platform does so much

Frequently Asked Questions about Sales Cadence Tools

What is Sales Cadence Software?

Sales cadence software is designed to help you send personalized multi-step email outreach campaigns to your potential customers.

For example, you can send one email out to a sales lead, and if they don’t reply, your sales cadence tool will send another email to them three days later.

Using sales cadence software is a powerful way to improve your outbound sales results. You won’t need to manually schedule and send emails, and you can start conversations with cold prospects even if you’re busy working on other tasks.

Sales cadence software is also referred to as email cadence software, so you might see this term used on vendor websites or used interchangeably.

Why Use Sales Cadence Software?

1. Automate Every Part of Your Email Outreach Workflow

Running cold email campaigns is a time-consuming affair. From sourcing prospects to writing personalized emails to remembering to follow up and organizing your leads in your CRM.

A sales cadence tool helps you manage this process in one place.

You can import your prospects, write out an email cadence with multiple steps and follow-ups, and schedule your emails to send automatically. Most sales cadence tools will integrate with a CRM like Pipedrive or HubSpot, so you can easily export your warm leads there to continue the conversation.

If you’ve ever tried to run a sales outreach campaign without using sales cadence software, you’ll know how difficult it is. These tools solve all of the pain points you will have experienced.

2. Collaborate With Your Team on Outreach

If you’re running a team and multiple people are involved in the outreach process, things can get confusing without a tool that lets you manage all of your outreach tasks in one place.

Sales cadence software with collaboration features built-in, such as QuickMail, enables your whole team to see what campaigns are running, who is in charge of what tasks, and understand which prospects are replying.

Your whole team will be on the same page about what’s going on, improving team productivity, and ensuring everyone is focused on high-leverage activities.

3. Personalize Every Email at Scale

One of the most powerful parts of sales cadence software is that they let you personalize emails at scale. Even if you send 100 emails at once, each one of those can include a unique email copy that’s tailored to the individual recipient.

When you reach out to busy decision-makers matching your ideal customer profile, they’ll immediately notice that you’ve gone out of your way to personalize your outreach and show that you’ve done your research.

Personalization also improves email deliverability, as it shows email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Outlook that you’re not sending a single email template to hundreds of people.

How Do You Run a Sales Cadence?

All of the sales cadence tools make it easy to build a cadence that matches your goals.

If you’re using cadences in your outbound sales strategy, here’s an example of what the process would look like:

  1. Identify key prospects to contact

  2. Personalize your sales cadence step to stand out in their inbox

  3. Automatically follow-up if someone doesn’t reply

  4. Add a multichannel touchpoint, like a phone call

  5. When you receive a reply, continue the conversation in a meeting

Once your sales cadence has achieved the result you want, which is usually getting a response, you can run your usual lead nurturing process to ensure you convert your warm leads into paying customers.

Final Words

All of these sales cadence tools are going to help you improve your outreach processes and start more conversations with your future clients and customers.

Before choosing one, make sure to chat with the teams behind the products or test them out with a free trial. 

As well as that, it’s important to remember that the tool isn’t going to be what gets you results. 

The results come from how well-qualified your prospect list is for your offer, and how well your outreach is tailored to each individual recipient. 

If you get those ingredients right, the sales cadence software you use will get you results and help you scale up your outreach.

If you’re ready to find the right sales cadence tool for your needs, you can get started with a 14-day free trial of QuickMail today.