Sequences can now skip counting weekend days towards the step interval

Introduction

Today, we're excited to announce that we've added additional sequence controls to help you schedule sales calls & coordinate on the timing of your calls and emails.

Historically, when a user is engaging a prospect or an account of prospects with a sequence, the SDR will use a schedule to determine which times of day and days of week they want to reach out.

Then, on days the schedule says not to send an email, or queue up a call task, the sequence has been smart enough to skip those days, and push the task out to the next available time window on another day, based on the schedule.

We call this option the Calendar Days interval because it still counts the calendar days the schedule says it can't deliver on towards the due date of the activity, based on the step interval.

Unfortunately sometimes that means that if you have a few days off on your schedule, such as a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the activities that would have landed on those days off, all get pushed to the next earliest day, and can possibly cause activities to pile up on a day like Monday.

Now, we've created a sequence option to allow the user to determine whether they want their activities scheduled for the next earliest time slot, or if instead they want Outreach to treat those days like they didn't exist. We call this option, the Schedule Days interval.

When in use, with the Friday to Sunday schedule example, rather than all of the activities piling up on Monday, they will be distributed to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, as if Friday through Sunday didn't even exist.

The Demo

To use this new Schedule Days option, go to your sequence settings, and look to the right of your selected schedule.

By default, sequences will use the Calendar Days option, but you can easily switch it to the Schedule Days instead. Don't forget to hit save.

The Schedule Interval Type option will be in the sequence settings, even if you have a ruleset applied to the sequence.

Additional Information

Now with this new setting enabled, the benefit is that you will see your activity volume smoothed out a little more, however do remember that using this will stretch the time between your touch points when straddling a set of days that your schedule says nothing should be happening.