All five bands
| Company size | Prospects | Reply rate | Meeting rate | Avg deal size | Pipeline per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 to 50 employees | 28,600 | 38.4% | 6.1% | €11,200 | €683,000 |
| 50 to 200 employees | 34,300 | 35.2% | 5.3% | €14,800 | €784,000 |
| 200 to 500 employees | 37,400 | 32.6% | 4.6% | €19,400 | €892,000 |
| 500 to 2,000 employees | 93,400 | 30.1% | 4.2% | €48,600 | €2,041,000 |
| 2,000+ employees | 196,190 | 26.8% | 3.5% | €102,000 | €3,570,000 |
What changes as companies get bigger
Gatekeeping and process. Under 50 people you are writing to the person who decides. Over 500 you are writing to someone who will need to bring in two others, which is why the first meeting at enterprise should be treated as a mapping exercise rather than a pitch.
Who you should target. Under about 50 employees, go to the founder: they are also the operator and there is no rung below. Over 2,000, go one rung below the obvious person. Directors and above replied at 32.0 percent and booked at 2.2 percent; managers and below replied at 26.0 percent and booked at 4.4 percent.
What the message has to survive. Enterprise punishes generic outreach harder than any other band and rewards research more. Verified subject-matter fit replied at 51.9 percent against 13.0 percent for job-title targeting on an otherwise identical enterprise sequence, which is the widest gap in the dataset.
The trap in the last column
Pipeline per thousand prospects is not the same as pipeline you can actually reach. Enterprise cycles are longer, the list is harder to build, and a single deal carries more risk. The column tells you where the value is, not how quickly you can get to it.
The band most B2B software companies underweight is 500 to 2,000. Meeting rate only drops from 4.6 to 4.2 percent against the band below, while deal size goes from €19,400 to €48,600. That is more than double the pipeline for almost the same effort.
See also
Breakdowns by persona, region and product category, and the fifteen controlled tests.
Cite this page as: Prospectio.ai, B2B outbound reply rates by company size, 389,890 prospects across 41 client programmes, 2018 to 2026.