Introduction
We looked at who actually replies in our data. The basis is 20,978 people contacted through SalesXMachina and 1,060 genuine replies. The result surprised us, because it contradicts what sales people are usually told.
The short version: practitioners reply more often than executives do.
Who actually replies
| Level | contacted | replies | reply rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practitioner (no management role) | 7,979 | 455 | 5.70 % |
| Department lead | 3,628 | 171 | 4.71 % |
| Executive / C-level | 8,223 | 379 | 4.61 % |
The gap between practitioners and executives is not noise. We calculated the 95 % interval for every row: practitioners sit between 5.21 and 6.23 percent, executives between 4.18 and 5.08 percent. The two ranges do not overlap. The difference is real.
So a good target group is not defined by seniority.
Why this runs against intuition
The standard advice is: go as high as you can. Talk to the decision-maker, not the user.
For closing the deal that is often right. For the reply rate it is not. Someone on the practitioner level has the problem on their desk every day. Someone above them has 200 emails a day and three assistants.
After seeing this data we believe the mistake is not contacting the wrong person. The mistake is contacting only one level.
Write to both levels, but differently
What works for us:
- The practitioner gets the concrete problem. They know it and can place it.
- The executive gets the consequence of the problem. They do not know the detail, but they know the number behind it.
Both messages are short. Both have one clear call to action. Only the hook differs.
Good sequences differ from bad ones in whether the copy matches the level, or whether the same message goes to everyone.
What this means for your targeting
If you only write to C-level today, you are leaving out the level that replies most often. If you only write to practitioners, you will be missing the person who signs later on.
So our recommendation is unambiguous: put both in the campaign, but do not give them the same text. At SalesXMachina this happens automatically, because the message is built from the signal and the role rather than from a template.
Next steps
We are still working out at which company size the picture flips. Our assumption: in small companies the executive is the practitioner, and the difference disappears there. As soon as the data supports it, we will write about it.
Goal
By the end of 2026 we want to be able to say which hook works for every role. Happy selling, Axel