Introduction
We analysed more than 20,000 messages sent across our customer base in recent months and are proud to announce: our reply rate is 6.0 % across all customer groups. The period covered runs from 1 May to 1 September 2026. Compared with the market standard of 1–2 %, our signal-based and personal approach sits well above the market average.
What we do differently + what we learned
We were sceptical ourselves about how well cold outreach works. After all, many people declared it dead long ago.
Our data shows clearly, though: cold outreach works. Provided you follow a few important rules:
Show the value for the reader right away
This may sound counterintuitive at first. But the best messages are clearly the ones that open with a well-placed insight.
Be very clear about your product positioning
Our data shows clearly that product positioning has to be sharp. The recipient of your message needs to know exactly what you want from them. With readers' short attention spans, there can be no doubt here.
Keep it short rather than long
Nobody has time for long texts. Even if it is hard to keep things brief, concise messages are ideal for high reply rates. The best texts have 2 blocks of at most 2 sentences each and a clear call to action. Less is more.
Send connection requests first, then a follow-up message within 3 days
Our data shows that the reply rate shoots up to over 20 % when you message a LinkedIn connection personally. That is why SalesXMachina puts building connections first by default. A follow-up message can then go out in the days after.
An accepted connection request increases your reply rate fourfold compared with no accepted request. Focus on building a network.
Connection requests with a note (up to 200 characters) from a regular LinkedIn profile raise the acceptance rate by another 60 %. Sales Navigator users can send notes of up to 300 characters, but in practice this makes no difference to the acceptance rate.
Send videos
People buy from people. Personal videos can work wonders, especially in an increasingly anonymous world. So my clear recommendation: record videos. For important accounts you want to work with personally, ideally a video tailored to a specific contact.
General videos per industry are often very effective. Ideally under 3 minutes. They should give a short introduction to the product, nothing more, and spark interest.
Connect third-party systems and see which companies visited your website by name.
For example, we like working with tools such as Snitcher.com, Salesviewer and Leadinfo.
Software like Snitcher.com, Salesviewer.com or Leadinfo.com can show your website visitors by company name. That way you can see, for instance, whether the company "Metro" was on your website.
We can then feed this information into SalesXMachina via our interfaces (API) and contact the right people directly. This is a strong buying signal.
Grow your network systematically
LinkedIn lets every user with a Sales Navigator licence send up to 150 connection requests per week. Few people know this. We make full use of this allowance for our customers.
We achieve an acceptance rate of around 25 % on our customers' profiles. The average is 20 %. That means from 600 connection requests we gain around 180 new connections every month. We can then contact these 180 connections with personalised messages.
On top of that comes the Sales Navigator allowance of 50 InMail credits per month.
So with SalesXMachina we can contact more than 230 people directly with just one profile, sending 600 connection requests a month. This builds pipeline for our customers. We can reach out again later to every connection gained in the network.
Use several different user accounts for prospecting
What works really well:
- User A messages Lead A but gets no response
- User B from the same company messages Lead A again one week later. According to our data, this raises reply rates by another 1.5 percentage points.
At SalesXMachina this strategy is a fixed part of our prospecting approach and runs automatically in the background.
A/B test your messages
SalesXMachina offers A/B tests. This lets us check text blocks for response rates and see which messages really work and which do not.
Our customers use this option to test in a short time which text blocks resonate in their core market and which do not.
Goal
Our goal is to reach a reply rate of 7 % by the end of 2026.
Happy selling, Axel