When should a follow-up cadence call instead of text?
In the first two weeks, and rarely after. That window is when a customer is still actively shopping and will still pick up, and when a two minute conversation covers ground ten texts will not. Past it, a call reads as pressure rather than persistence. The harder question is not whether to call, it is how the timing is measured.
Why do phone calls stop working after the first two weeks?
Because the customer's situation has resolved one way or the other. Inside the first two weeks they are still deciding, still comparing, still willing to take a call from the store they inquired at. That is the window where a call earns its interruption.
After it, one of two things is true. They bought, in which case the call is awkward. Or they went quiet on purpose, in which case the call is the thing they were avoiding. Neither improves with a third attempt. Text and email survive that transition because the customer answers them when they are ready, and a call demands that they be ready now.
That is why call touches should be concentrated rather than sprinkled. A cadence that puts a call in week one, week three and week eight has one useful call and two that cost goodwill.
Why does a call on a separate list never get made?
Because it has to compete. A call list is a second place to look, and a rep with a full day works what is in front of them. The call that sits on its own list loses to the text that arrived in the conversation the rep already had open.
A call touch that arrives as a due step inside the cadence, attached to the customer's history, does not compete. It is already part of the sequence the rep is working through. This is a smaller distinction than it sounds and it changes whether the touch happens at all.
It also makes the cadence honest about itself. If calls live somewhere else, the cadence report shows a follow-up that looks complete while a third of the plan is happening somewhere nobody measures.
What is the most common mistake in building a cadence?
Measuring delays from the wrong point. Cadence steps usually wait a number of days from the previous step, but they are frequently written as though they wait that many days from the day the lead arrived. Those two produce wildly different schedules and only one of them is what the author meant.
Get it backwards and the delays stack. A touch written for day three lands on day six, the next on day twelve, and a closing message meant for week two arrives months later, telling a customer you are closing their file about a car they bought in the spring. The copy is fine. The arithmetic ruined it.
bkd.ai's default cadences for inventory, seller and subprime leads now carry Power Dialer call tasks across the first two weeks alongside the text steps, with the delays measured from the previous step. Stores running the original seeded cadences picked this up automatically. A store that had already customised its own cadence kept exactly what it built, which is the right default, and can add call touches in the cadence editor whenever it wants them.
Frequently asked questions
When should a follow-up cadence include a phone call?
In the first two weeks after the lead arrives. That is the window where a customer is still actively shopping and most likely to pick up. A call in week seven reads as pressure rather than persistence, so later touches are better served by text and email.
Should call tasks live inside the cadence or on a separate call list?
Inside the cadence. A call on a separate list competes with everything else a rep is doing and loses. A call that arrives as a due step, with the customer's history attached, gets made because it is already in front of the rep.
How should delays between follow-up steps be measured?
From the previous step, not from the day the lead came in. Mixing the two is the most common cadence build error, and it stacks every delay so that a message written for week two can fire months later, saying something the customer stopped caring about long ago.