The number
| Measure | Outsourcing |
|---|---|
| Prospects contacted | 3,480 |
| Meeting rate | 5.3% |
| Rank | 3rd of 12 |
| Cross-category average | 3.9% |
| Meetings per 1,000 prospects | 53 |
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
Outsourcing books at 5.3 percent across 3,480 prospects, joint second of twelve. Small sample, consistent with the pattern at the top of the table: the problem is recognised before the message arrives.
Outsourcing has one structural advantage the software categories do not. The buyer is usually under a specific, dated pressure, a headcount freeze, a project that has to ship, a team that just lost two people. Timing matters more here than copy, which is why the same message can do nothing for six weeks and then book three meetings in a fortnight.
Everything in the playbook about response speed applies double. Replies answered inside 24 hours converted at 21.4 percent against 3.6 percent after 48 hours, and in a category driven by an immediate pressure, two days is long enough for someone else to solve it.
The tests that matter most here
- Answering replies within 24 hours: 6× more meetings
- Naming a shared colleague: +30% reply rate
- Two and a half sentences, question-led: 2.4× 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
3,480 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 Outsourcing, 3,480 prospects, 2018 to 2026.