The number
| Measure | Networking and security |
|---|---|
| Prospects contacted | 59,700 |
| Meeting rate | 3.5% |
| Rank | 12th of 12 |
| Cross-category average | 3.9% |
| Meetings per 1,000 prospects | 35 |
This is meeting rate, not reply rate. It counts a meeting from the point it was accepted in the client’s calendar, which is why it is a much smaller number than the reply-rate benchmarks published elsewhere in this category. Reply rate is a leading indicator. Meeting rate is the decision.
What the data says
Networking and security books at 3.5 percent across 59,700 prospects, joint last of twelve on a large and therefore reliable sample.
Security is the hardest category in this dataset to run cold outbound into, and the reason is the audience rather than the product. Security buyers are trained to treat unsolicited contact as a risk surface. The instinct that makes someone good at the job also makes them a difficult prospect, and no message fixes that.
Two things moved the number in our programmes. Routing through a shared connection, which lifted reply rate from 27.0 to 35.1 percent across the dataset and matters more here than anywhere. And going one rung below the CISO, where the person who owns the tooling day to day has both the problem and the diary space.
If you sell security, treat outbound as a supporting channel rather than the primary one. Events, community and referral do more work in this category than they do in any other.
The tests that matter most here
- Naming a shared colleague: +30% reply rate
- Junior profiles book twice the meetings
- Verified subject-matter fit against job title: 4× the reply rate
The full set of fifteen is on the 2026 outbound benchmarks page.
All twelve categories
| Category | Prospects | Meeting rate |
|---|---|---|
| Software development | 17,630 | 5.5% |
| Coding software | 3,690 | 5.3% |
| Outsourcing | 3,480 | 5.3% |
| Marketing SaaS | 2,880 | 5.3% |
| Systems integration | 4,050 | 4.6% |
| Analytical SaaS | 3,760 | 4.6% |
| HR SaaS and AI | 46,200 | 4.4% |
| CPaaS | 34,800 | 4.2% |
| AI order-to-cash | 12,400 | 4.2% |
| Cloud platform | 117,000 | 3.5% |
| CRM | 84,300 | 3.5% |
| Networking and security | 59,700 | 3.5% |
The spread from top to bottom is 5.5 against 3.5 percent, a factor of 1.6. Worth keeping in perspective: in the targeting test, the same sequence produced 13.0 and 51.9 percent reply rates depending only on how the list was built. Category matters less than how well you know the person you are writing to.
How this data was collected
59,700 prospects in this category, inside a dataset of 389,890 prospects and 15,018 meetings run for 17 clients across 41 programmes between 2018 and 2026. Prospects were split at random inside each client account for every controlled test, holding industry, geography, seniority and company size constant on both sides, and no test was called below 2,000 prospects per arm.
One thing to hold in mind. The category is the seller’s, not the prospect’s: it describes what our client sells rather than what the person receiving the message does. The breakdowns by who was contacted are on the persona, company size and region pages.
Cite this page as: Prospectio.ai, Outbound benchmarks for Networking and security, 59,700 prospects, 2018 to 2026.