Ryan Dohrn explains his "Pattern of 3" follow-up strategy: contact prospects every three business days, varying the time of day each time. He calls this the "3 on 7" rhythm, which keeps you memorable without being annoying. Test any new cadence for a few weeks before deciding it doesn't work.
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Ryan explains his ‘Pattern of 3’: contacting prospects every three business days (the 3‑on‑7 rhythm), varying the time of each outreach, and positioning this cadence as politely persistent—enough to be memorable but not so frequent as to be annoying.
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What's going on, friends and fans? Ryan Dohrn here answering your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Thanks for trusting me with your questions. Keep them coming, we appreciate it. And whether you're listening to the podcast or watching the video, be sure to subscribe down below and please give us a thumbs up. It lets YouTube and Google know that we're doing good things for all of you out there. All right, next question comes from Teresa in Phoenix. Hey, Teresa. Ryan, I'm curious about your patterns of persistence. They seem pretty aggressive for the market that I'm selling in, so if you could explain a little bit more, I would appreciate it. I want to grow and get things done faster. So, Teresa, I think those are all really good goals. So everything that I teach follows the pattern of 3. I've talked about it tons of times. The pattern of 3 is really easy to describe. Everything in nature happens in 3s. Takes 3 things to start a fire, 3 things to move a mountain, Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, the 3 Musketeers. I mean, I could go on and on. Everything just kind of occurs naturally in groupings of 3 in, in nature. So I follow the pattern of persistence of every 3 business days because it actually just works out. I feel like it's kind of a natural way to follow up. Now, every 3 business days on 7— so 3 on 7 means that I'm going to be reaching out, say, on a Monday. I'm not going to reach out on Tuesday or Wednesday, but then I'm going to reach out on Thursday. I'm not going to reach out on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, but then the next Tuesday. Then not Wednesday, not Thursday, but then the next Friday. So what happens when you use a business day pattern of 3, you're not going to hit on the same day at the same time except for every, what, about, I guess about 3 weeks or so if my math kind of works out. Now if you call somebody every day, that's annoying. If you call someone every other day, that's not quite as annoying but still annoying. Every 3 business days, I believe, proves to people that you're serious, that you're not going to give up, that you're going to reach out in a politely persistent way. Now here's what I can tell you for sure, Teresa in Phoenix, and that is that reaching out once a week, it's— you're very forgettable, you're very deletable. I want to be— and I hate to say this this way, but it's the best way to say it, Teresa— I want to be just annoying enough to get a reaction, but not so annoying that it makes somebody angry. And I've found that every 3 business days actually works. So that's why I do it, and I have great success with it. Now, what I do though, Teresa, is I vary up the times that I'm calling and the times that I'm sending email. So let's just say I do Wednesday, say at 11:30 as an example, and I like 11:30 and 4:30 for prospecting. It works well for me Wednesday, not Thursday, not Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but then the next Monday is when I'm going to reach out. I might reach out then at 4:15. If I did a 3:30 reach out before, I might try 4:15 to identify the pattern that that potential advertising or client prospect might be using. So polite persistence works, Teresa. Just remember, you're doing to that customer what they would hope their salespeople would be doing. So you're not doing anything wrong unless you're calling somebody every single day. That just gets to be a little bit annoying. Never forget, friends, if this job was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. We're not crazy out there. It's a great career. It'll feed your family for a lifetime if you're willing to try new things and give it a fair test. A fair test for me would be try something for a couple of weeks before you really give up on it. All right, Theresa, good luck out there. Keep your questions coming, ryan@ryandohrn.com, and we'll get to a couple more questions here in a couple more weeks. Take care, friends. Get out there, sell something to make us all proud. If I can be of help to you, reach out to me, ryan@ryandohrn.com.
