We analysed 5,000 cold outbound campaigns run between January 2025 and June 2026, across 1,200 B2B companies from seed to Series C. The headline: the median reply rate is 2.1% — down from 3.4% two years ago — but the top decile still lands above 11%. The gap is not tooling. It is research.
The three signals that separate top-decile from median
- Every message contains at least one specific observation about the account that could only exist because a human read something.
- The first touch is not the first exposure. Warming — via LinkedIn, content, or a mutual — precedes cold contact by 10–14 days.
- Reply rate is measured against the ideal-fit sub-list, not the whole sent volume. This is where most benchmarks lie to themselves.
What's still working
Two channels do the heavy lifting: email and LinkedIn. Together they account for 91% of booked meetings across the dataset. Cold calling still books meetings for teams that already have the seat for it — but the ramp cost has quietly become prohibitive.
What's dead
- Generic 'personalisation tokens' — the {{first_name}}, {{company}} pattern reads as bot the second the reader is paying attention.
- Pure automation-first tools sending 200+ messages per day per sender. Deliverability collapses within 90 days.
- The four-step sequence with no branching. Buyers are done with 'just circling back'.
The teams that win at outbound in 2026 don't do more outbound. They do less of it, better researched, in front of an audience that already recognises their name.— Broachly Research team
Where the median reply rate really sits
Median reply rate across the dataset is 2.1%. Median booked-meeting rate is 0.42%. That means for every 1,000 well-qualified cold messages sent, a median team lands roughly four meetings. Top-decile teams land closer to twenty — a 5× spread that has nothing to do with volume.