Ask a firm how follow-up works and the answer is usually a description of intent. People are diligent. The good ones chase. There is a CRM.
What that describes is a system running on individual memory. It performs at the level of whoever is least busy that week, and it collapses quietly when the best seller is on holiday or leaves.
What a cadence actually specifies
A defined cadence says when contact happens, what each contact is for, and what ends the sequence. The last part is the one that gets skipped, and it is why unresolved opportunities accumulate until someone declares bankruptcy on the pipeline and deletes them in a batch.
Written down, the cadence survives a departure. That is the point of writing it. A seller who leaves takes their relationships, and there is no preventing that. They should not also take the method.
Review against a standard
The same applies to conversations. Where calls are reviewed at all, they are usually reviewed against opinion, which means the reviewer's instincts become the standard by default. A written discovery standard and a review rubric make the assessment repeatable, and they let someone junior improve without shadowing someone senior for a year.