Nurturance · Outbound Benchmarks
What outbound actually looks like in fintech & insurtech
Not the LinkedIn-guru version. These are the real conversion rates from a live book of fintech and insurtech outbound, so you can sanity-check your own founder-led motion against them.
Source: the live Nurturance book. 590,536 cold dials, 68,219 cold emails, 2,375 LinkedIn connects, 524 QA'd booked meetings. Each figure is that channel's actual history, not modelled.
1 in 511
cold dials to book one meeting
30%
of LinkedIn connection requests accepted
3.5%
cold email reply rate (1 meeting per 670 sent)
Cold call
590,536 dials
Highest throughput channel, but it runs on volume. Most pickups are gatekeepers and wrong numbers, so the number that matters is what you book off the conversations that actually reach a decision-maker.
Right-fit conversationsreached the actual decision-maker
11,540
Meetings booked
1,154~1 in 10 right-fit
LinkedIn
2,375 connects
Highest efficiency per touch and the cheapest channel to start founder-led. One good profile plus a specific note does the work of a lot of dials.
Repliedof conversations opened
25.5%221 replies
Interested
121positive replies
Cold email
68,219 contacted
Lowest reply rate of the three, but it scales cheaply once the sending infrastructure is built. The whole game is volume plus a clean list, the 1.1% bounce rate here is what "clean" looks like.
Leads emailed172,619 emails sent
68,219
Meetings booked
1021 per 670
What a booked meeting actually costs
524 meetings
Booking the meeting is half the job. Here's the quality bar a meeting has to clear, and what one costs three different ways.
77%
show rate (counting cancellations as no-shows)
90%
of meetings that show are qualified fits
Cost of a booked meeting, three ways
~$1,000 /mo
You do it. Just the tooling stack, dialler, email infra, data, LinkedIn. Cheap in cash, but it costs you roughly 500 dials per meeting. Your time is the real price.
$2,560 /meeting
Your own AE does it. Loaded cost once you count salary, ramp, and the management overhead.
$1,500 /meeting
Done for you. No stack to run, no one to hire or manage, no ramp. Just the meetings.
What this means for your outbound
- Start on LinkedIn, not email. At 30% acceptance and 25% reply it's the cheapest channel to run yourself with zero infrastructure. Email works, but it's a pure volume game (one meeting per 670 sent), so it only pays once the sending setup is built. Cold call scales hardest but only when you can stomach the dials.
- Respect the volume math. 10 cold-booked meetings a month is roughly 5,000 dials, about 255 a day. If you're making 30 calls and wondering why nothing books, that's why.
- Guard the show rate. A booked meeting that no-shows is wasted pipeline. 77% is achievable, most founders sit closer to 55% because nothing happens between the book and the call.
- Three ways to buy a meeting. Run the tools yourself for about $1,000 a month and pay in time, hire an AE at roughly $2,560 a meeting all-in, or done-for-you at around $1,500 with none of the overhead. The cheapest cash option costs you the most hours. The middle removes both.