The result
| Variant | Reply rate | Meeting rate |
|---|---|---|
| Director level and above | 32.0% | 2.2% |
| Manager level and below | 26.0% | 4.4% |
Sample
2019, twelve weeks, 11,780 prospects. Companies over 2,000 employees. Same message, same sequence, same companies, split by seniority.
Why it works
A director replies because replying is polite and costs nothing. They are not going to take the meeting. They have direct reports who own the problem and a diary that belongs to someone else, so the reply you get is usually a referral wearing the clothes of interest.
The person one rung down owns the thing day to day. They have space in the week. And they are usually looking for something to bring upwards, because that is how you get noticed at that level. You are not interrupting their job, you are handing them material for it.
This is the finding that gets the most pushback, because every sales leader has been told to sell high, and going higher feels like doing the job properly. On this data it produces more polite replies and fewer meetings.
How to apply it
In enterprise, target the manager or lead who owns the function, not the director above them. Let the meeting produce the introduction upwards.
Under about 50 employees, do the opposite. The founder is also the operator and there is no rung below, which is why founders and CEOs were the highest-replying persona in the dataset at 41.2 percent.
If you get a referral down from a senior person, treat it as a warm introduction and say so explicitly in the message to the person below. That is worth more than either cold route.
What this test does not tell you
2019, which makes it the oldest test in the set, and enterprise only. Job titles have inflated since, so the boundary between director and manager is less meaningful now than it was. The mechanism, that the person who owns the work has more diary space than the person who owns the budget, has held in everything we have run since.
Method
One variable at a time. A test alters a single element; if two things change we learn nothing. Prospects were split at random inside each client account, holding industry, geography, seniority and company size constant on both sides. No test was called below 2,000 prospects per arm, because outbound is noisy at low volume. Reply rate is reported as the leading indicator and meeting rate as the decision, because several variants lifted replies and produced no extra meetings at all, and those were not rolled out.
This test is one of fifteen in a dataset covering 389,890 prospects and 15,018 meetings across 41 client programmes and 17 clients, run between 2018 and 2026. The full set is on the 2026 outbound benchmarks page.
Cite this page as: Prospectio.ai, Test 7: director level and above against manager level and below, B2B Outbound Benchmarks 2026.