This week's benchmark

70,004 dials produced a 7.1% connect rate across our SDR teams. If your own team is tracking connect rate at all, that's the number to hold it against. In our experience, teams that quote connect rates well above 10% on cold fintech and insurtech lists are usually counting any pickup, including gatekeepers and wrong numbers, not decision-maker conversations. A connect rate near 7% on a genuinely cold, ICP-filtered list is normal, not a red flag. If yours is much lower, the first place to look is list freshness and dial timing, not the pitch.

What a qualified meeting looks like

Of 4,977 connections this week, 1,414 turned into ICP conversations of 60 seconds or more, and 79 became booked meetings. That's a 5.6% ICP-to-booking rate.

Plenty of agencies quote 10-20% ICP-to-booking. That number usually includes anything put on a calendar, including tentative slots weeks out that never survive to the call. We don't book those. We only book inside 7 days, never tentative, and only when the prospect has qualified on the call itself. That's why our raw rate looks lower on paper, and why the meetings that do get booked tend to hold up.

The proof is in what happens after booking, not at booking. Of last week's meetings, 75% were set within 7 days of the call, median 6 days out. Of the meetings booked in the last 30 days that have since been held, 86% were qualified as legitimate by the client, 63 held meetings in that window. On our longest-running fintech campaign, that number is 92%, 24 of 26 held meetings over 60 days. What we track is whether the meeting was worth having.

What your buyers are saying

A few patterns from this week's fintech and insurtech calls:

• CTOs on payment gateway calls are increasingly framing the conversation around cost, not latency. That's a shift from what we heard even a few months ago, and it changes what a first call needs to open with.
• Fintech decision-makers are pushing back on being routed straight into a 15-minute SDR slot. They want 5+ minutes of real context before they'll commit to booking anything.
• Regulatory automation buyers keep making the same point: the market isn't one thing. Pitches that lump every reg tech use case together lose the room fast, and prospects will say so directly.

One thing to use today

Pull your last 30 days of booked meetings and check how many were set within 7 days of the call versus further out. If a meaningful share are tentative bookings 2+ weeks away, that's where your held-meeting rate is quietly leaking. Tightening the booking window is a smaller change than it sounds and it shows up fast in what actually survives to the call.

From the blog

• Conversation Rate, Not List Quality, Predicts Sales Success
• CTOs shift from latency to cost: What gateway talks reveal
• Why fintech decision-makers need 5+ minutes before booking SDRs

If any of this is useful for your own pipeline, we take on a limited number of new campaigns each cohort, starting the 1st and the 15th. Book 15 minutes at cal.com/cormac-repman/15min if you want to talk through whether it fits.