The numbers
| Measure | IT Directors | Dataset average | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prospects contacted | 58,400 | – | – |
| Reply rate | 34.2% | 32.3% | 4th of 14 |
| Meeting rate | 4.8% | 4.7% | 7th of 14 |
| Average deal size | €38,000 | €39,006 | 7th of 14 |
| Pipeline per 1,000 prospects | €1,824,000 | – | 7th of 14 |
Reply rate is 1.9 points above the dataset average and meeting rate is 0.1 points above it.
What the data says about this persona
IT directors are the largest single persona in the dataset at 58,400 prospects, which makes their numbers the most reliable of the fourteen. They reply at 34.2 percent and book at 4.8 percent, both just above average, with a €38,000 average deal.
They were the persona in the video test. Across 8,385 prospects at 50 to 200 employee companies, IT directors and CTOs sent a personalised video as the first touch replied at 40.4 percent against 28.8 percent for text, and booked 57 percent more meetings. The effect held across all three accounts and did not decay over eleven weeks, which is unusual: most novelty tactics in outbound decay inside a month.
The thing that separates a good IT director list from a bad one is whether the person actually owns budget. The title covers everything from a two-person internal helpdesk to a €4m infrastructure remit, and no amount of message quality fixes a list that has both on it.
What to put in the message
The system, vendor or contract you think is coming up for renewal. A peer company using something similar. One question about the current setup.
What to leave out
Feature lists and anything security-adjacent that you cannot back up. IT directors forward those to procurement, which is the worst outcome available.
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 58,400 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 IT Directors, 58,400 prospects, 2018 to 2026.