The numbers
| Measure | CTOs | Dataset average | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prospects contacted | 34,900 | – | – |
| Reply rate | 31.6% | 32.3% | 7th of 14 |
| Meeting rate | 5.1% | 4.7% | 4th of 14 |
| Average deal size | €44,500 | €39,006 | 4th of 14 |
| Pipeline per 1,000 prospects | €2,270,000 | – | 5th of 14 |
Reply rate is 0.7 points below the dataset average and meeting rate is 0.4 points above it.
What the data says about this persona
CTOs reply at 31.6 percent, slightly below the dataset average, and book at 5.1 percent, which is fourth highest. That combination is the useful part: fewer replies, better ones. A CTO who answers has usually decided the problem is real.
They were in two of the fifteen tests. In the InMail test, CTOs and product leaders at 500 to 2,000 employee companies replied to InMail at 3.7 percent and to a connection request at 37.0 percent. In the video test, CTOs and IT directors at 50 to 200 employee companies replied to a personalised video at 40.4 percent against 28.8 percent for text.
Company size changes the CTO picture more than it changes any other persona. At a 40-person company the CTO is writing code and will answer a technical question directly. At a 3,000-person company the title means budget, board reporting and vendor management, and the person who will actually take your meeting is the head of engineering or the solution architect underneath them.
What to put in the message
Something specific about their architecture or a technology decision they have made publicly. A competitor’s stack. One question, technical.
What to leave out
Business value framing, InMail, and any message over 420 characters. CTOs were the persona most sensitive to length in our data.
The format itself does not change by persona. Across every segment we tested, the winning first message was two and a half sentences, ended in a question, named something of theirs, said nothing about us and landed between 240 and 420 characters. That version replied at 44.5% against 18.6% for the same message with solution detail added.
Method
Figures for this persona come from 34,900 prospects inside a wider 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, so industry, geography, seniority and company size are held constant on both sides of every controlled test. Meetings are counted at the point one was accepted in the client’s calendar; we do not track what happens after that.
Full method, all fifteen tests and the breakdowns by company size and region are on the 2026 outbound benchmarks page.
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Cite this page as: Prospectio.ai, Outbound benchmarks for CTOs, 34,900 prospects, 2018 to 2026.