The 14-day cadence
Eight touchpoints, two weeks.
9 min readUpdated 2026
The exact 14-day, three-channel outbound cadence I run as a current top-performing SDR. Every touch, the order, and the reasoning behind each one.
Welcome
A great cadence isn’t about more touches. It’s about the right touches in the right order.
Most SDRs design their cadence by accident: whatever Outreach auto-suggested, with a few tweaks. The result is the same cadence everyone else runs, hitting the same prospects everyone else hits, with the same generic touches everyone else sends.
Here’s what I actually run. Eight touches, three channels, fourteen days. Every touch has a job. Every gap is on purpose. And every prospect comes out of it either in a conversation or cleanly closed-out so I can re-queue them next quarter without the awkwardness of having ghosted them.
The math
Why eight, three, fourteen.
Three numbers that anchor every cadence decision. Internalise these and the day-by-day below stops feeling arbitrary.
8
touches across the 14-day window. Not more — adding touches past 8 has near-zero incremental reply rate (Salesloft 2024).
3
channels: phone, email, LinkedIn. Three is the sweet spot; four (adding text/WhatsApp) hurts trust without lifting reply rate.
10–15%
of replies in a multi-channel cadence come from the breakup email (day 14). The hardest-working message is the last one.
Overview
The full 14 days at a glance.
Filled circles are touch days. Gaps are deliberate — the empty days let the prospect breathe so the next touch lands fresh.
Touches: days 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 14. Gaps: 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13.
Day by day
Every touch, in order, with the why.
Day 01 · Monday
Open with phone + email
Cold call in the morning power hour. If no pickup, send the trigger email within 30 minutes — same day, same prospect, two channels. The voicemail mentions the email is incoming so the inbox has context.
Why this touch:Most outbound mistakes happen by spreading touches too thin too late. Hitting two channels on day 1 doubles your shot at being seen while the trigger that prompted you to reach out is still fresh.
Day 02 · Tuesday
Phone, different time
Cold call again, but at a different hour to day 1 — if you called at 10am Monday, try 3:30pm Tuesday. No email this day. The phone gets a clean second attempt.
Why this touch:Pickup rates vary by ~3× across hours. Trying the same prospect at two different times catches the windows your prospect actually answers, without spamming the inbox.
Day 03 · Wednesday
LinkedIn connection request
Send a connection request with a short, no-pitch note: "Hi [Name], no agenda — saw your post on [topic] and the [specific point] resonated. Following along." No DM yet.
Why this touch:Builds a third channel without burning it. The connection request signals you're a real human paying attention, not a sales bot. The accept rate roughly doubles when you've already touched email + phone.
Day 04 · Thursday
Phone + email, new angle
Cold call again. Send a follow-up email — different angle to day 1. If day 1's email led with the trigger, day 4's email leads with a customer outcome or an industry insight.
Why this touch:Same prospect, same day, but a fresh hook so the email doesn't read as 'bumping the same message'. New angle = new chance to land.
Day 06 · Monday
Phone + LinkedIn DM
Cold call. If they accepted the connection, send the DM today: "Thanks for connecting. Quick context for why I reached out: [reason]. If [pain] is a priority, happy to share what we're seeing. Otherwise no worries."
Why this touch:The connection has had time to feel real but is recent enough to remember. The DM picks up where the connection note left off, ties to a specific reason, and gives the soft opt-out.
Day 09 · Thursday
Case-study email
Send a short email with one specific customer outcome. "[Similar company] saw [specific metric] in [timeframe] after switching from [thing they're using]. Thought of you because [reason]." Soft opt-out at the end.
Why this touch:By day 9 you've spent two weeks earning permission. A case study now reads as a peer comparison, not a pitch. The 'thought of you because' line ties back to the trigger from day 1, closing the narrative loop.
Day 11 · Monday
Phone, last attempt
Cold call once more. If they pick up, lead with the case-study angle from day 9 ("sent you a note last week about [Similar company]"). If voicemail, leave a short message + signal the breakup is coming.
Why this touch:By day 11 you've shown up more than 90% of cold-outbound SDRs ever do. The persistence itself signals seriousness, and prospects who pick up at this stage often convert at higher rates than day-1 pickups.
Day 14 · Thursday
Breakup email
Short, honest, no guilt-trip: "Closing the loop on my end. If [pain] becomes a priority later, here's how to find me: [link]. Either way, hope [their company]'s [recent thing] keeps going well."
Why this touch:The breakup email is the highest-converting message in any cadence. People who ignored 7 prior touches will reply to a clean exit. ~10-15% of breakup emails get a reply, and most of those replies say 'sorry, was buried — let's talk'.
Mid-way check-in
Want me to design your cadence with you?
We’ll build a cadence specific to your product, persona, and deal cycle. Same 14-day rhythm, your words. Usually 30 minutes.
Design your own
Five principles for designing a cadence that fits your product.
You won’t run my exact cadence verbatim. You’ll adapt it. Here are the rules to hold onto when you do:
01 · Front-load the multi-channel
Day 1 should be at least two channels (phone + email). Spreading touches across days dilutes the signal that you're a real person paying attention to a real trigger.
02 · Vary the angle, not just the bump
Each touch needs a fresh angle — trigger, customer outcome, question, insight. Don't bump the same email three times. Same hook in three different envelopes is still the same hook.
03 · Build in deliberate gaps
Days 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13 have no touches on purpose. The prospect needs space between touches or the cadence reads as harassment. Gaps are where conversion happens, not just touches.
04 · Always end with a clean exit
Day 14 is the breakup email — the most-replied message in any cadence. It also lets you re-queue the prospect next quarter without the relationship feeling burned.
05 · Three channels max
Phone, email, LinkedIn. Adding text or WhatsApp as cold channels in 2026 hurts trust and damages long-term deliverability across the channels that matter. Save them for warmer relationships.
The bonus
Five cadence variations by deal size, plus a printable cadence template.
The 14-day cadence above is a starting point. The shape of your cadence should match the shape of your deal — not the other way round. Below: five variations tuned for SMB, mid-market, and enterprise deal sizes, with the specific touches to add or drop. Plus a printable template you can run for two weeks across 30 prospects.
Common questions
What people ask me about cadence design.
- Why 14 days and not 7 or 21?
- Seven days is too short — most enterprise prospects haven't even seen your first touch yet. Twenty-one days is too long — by day 21 the trigger that prompted your outreach is stale and you've drifted off the prospect's radar. Fourteen days lands in the sweet spot: enough touches to break through, recent enough that the original reason still applies.
- What if the prospect replies on day 4?
- Stop the cadence immediately. The whole point is to start a conversation; once the conversation starts, you're in 1:1 mode, not in sequence. Most CRMs auto-pause the cadence on reply. If yours doesn't, do it manually — nothing makes a prospect ghost faster than getting a templated email after they've already replied.
- Should I personalise every touch or just the first?
- Personalise the first touch (day 1) and the LinkedIn DM (day 6). Personalise the WHY in every other touch — the opener line that proves you're paying attention. The body of the bump emails can stay templated. Personalising every word of every touch is a bad use of your time relative to running more accounts in parallel.
- What about texting? WhatsApp?
- Text and WhatsApp work for warmer accounts — specifically, prospects who’ve already replied to email but stalled. As a cold channel they’re too invasive in 2026 and they damage long-term trust. Save them for re-engagement after a real conversation has happened. The cold-calling guide and cold-email teardowns are still where the cold conversation should start.
- How do I track all this?
- Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, and HubSpot Sales all run multi-channel cadences natively in 2026. If your company doesn't pay for one of those, a simple spreadsheet works: prospect name + email + phone + LinkedIn URL + one column per day with the touch + status. The tool is less important than running the same cadence on every prospect, every time, without forgetting.
The cadence is the skeleton. The cold-calling guide, cold-email teardowns, and the full outbound playbook have the actual scripts and frameworks for each touch.
What to read next
Three more from the outbound playbook.
Cold calling
Cold calling in 2026
The opener, the pause, the objection patterns, and the talk-ratio data nobody talks about. Written by someone still picking up the phone every week.
10 min read
Cold email
Cold email teardowns
Real cold emails marked up line by line. Subject lines, openers, value pivots, and the breakup template that gets the highest reply rate.
11 min read
AI & outbound
AI in cold outbound
Where AI lifts SDR output and where it tanks reply rates. The 2026 hybrid stack, real prompts, and the mistakes that get accounts blacklisted.
11 min read
Written by
Isobel Hardwick
Current top-performing SDR at one of APAC’s fastest-growing SaaS companies. Hits between 177% and 344% of target every quarter. Works 1:1 with career-changers until they land their first SDR role.
The cadence is the easy part. Running it every week is what books meetings.
We design your cadence together, then I keep you accountable to running it. Most clients hit their first booked-meeting milestone within four weeks of working together.