Introduction
We analysed more than 20,000 messages sent across our customer base over recent months, and we are proud to share the result: our reply rate is 6.0 % across all customer segments. The period we measured runs from 1 May to 1 September 2026. Against a market standard of 1–2 %, our signal-based and personal approach puts us well above the average.
What we do differently, and what we learned
We were sceptical ourselves about how well cold outreach still works. Plenty of people have declared it dead.
Our data says otherwise, clearly: cold outreach works. As long as you follow a few important rules.
Do not sell
That may sound counterintuitive at first. But the best messages are unmistakably the ones that carry an insight.
What separates good messages from bad ones is the value they hold for the reader.
Be clear about your product positioning
Our data shows plainly that product positioning has to be clear. The person receiving your message needs to know what exactly you want from them. Attention spans are short, so there is no room for doubt here.
What separates good messages from bad ones is their clarity.
Write short rather than long
Nobody has time for long texts. Keeping it short is hard, but concision is what drives high reply rates. The best messages are two blocks of no more than two sentences each, plus one clear call to action. Less really is more.
What separates good messages from bad ones is their brevity.
Send the connection request first, then a follow-up within 3 days
Our data shows the reply rate jumping above 20 % when you message a LinkedIn contact personally. That is why building the connection first is the default at SalesXMachina. A follow-up message then works well in the days that follow.
An accepted connection request lifts your reply rate to four times what it is without one. Focus on building a network.
Connection requests with a note (up to 200 characters) on a standard LinkedIn profile raise the acceptance rate by another 60 %. Sales Navigator users can send notes of up to 300 characters, but in practice that makes no difference to the acceptance rate.
What separates good outreach sequences from bad ones is that the focus sits on connection requests.
Send videos
People buy from people. In a world that keeps getting more anonymous, a personal video can work wonders. So my recommendation is unambiguous: record videos. For important accounts you want to work with personally, record one tailored to that specific contact.
General videos per industry are often highly effective. Ideally under 3 minutes. They should give a short introduction to the product, nothing more, and spark interest.
What separates good outreach sequences from bad ones is whether you follow up with a personal video, for instance for the people who did not reply.
Plug in third-party systems
We like working with tools such as Snitcher.com, Salesviewer and Leadinfo, for example.
Software like Snitcher.com, Salesviewer.com or Leadinfo.com can show your website visitors by name. That way you can see whether a company such as "Metro" was on your site.
We can then feed that information back into SalesXMachina through our API and contact those people directly. That is a strong buying signal.
What separates a good outbound strategy from a weak one is using tools that resolve companies by name for you.
Use metadata and insights
At SalesXMachina we can read from a user's metadata who has a high probability of replying, and why. Location data is one example of such metadata. Our software then approaches the people who statistically show a higher reply rate. You notice this immediately as a user, because reply rates here are higher than with other tools such as Clay or Dripify. Our software lets you raise your reply rates substantially with little effort.
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 put that allowance to heavy use for our customers.
We achieve an acceptance rate of roughly 25 % on our customers' profiles. The average sits at 20 %. That means 600 connection requests bring in about 180 new contacts every month. Those 180 contacts can then be approached with personalised messages.
On top of that comes the Sales Navigator allowance of 50 credits per month.
So with SalesXMachina, a single profile can reach more than 230 people directly and send 600 connection requests a month. That builds pipeline for our customers.
Use several different user accounts for outreach
What works really well:
- User A messages Lead A and gets no response
- User B from the same company messages Lead A again a week later. According to our data this lifts reply rates by another 1.5 percentage points.
At SalesXMachina this is a fixed part of our outreach strategy and runs automatically in the background.
A/B test your copy
SalesXMachina offers A/B tests. They let us measure blocks of copy against response rates and see which texts genuinely work and which do not.
Half of our customers use this setting and find out quickly which blocks of copy land in their core market and which fall flat.
Next steps
We keep monitoring our data and evaluating it in anonymised form. That gives us an ever better understanding of how conversations start, how they turn into meetings, and how that creates value. For our customers we also offer further analysis on how to adapt their copy and their approach to become even more successful.
Goal
Our goal is to reach a 7 % reply rate by the end of 2026. Happy selling, Axel