Benchmark: 6.8% Connect Rate

This week we made 79,302 dials and connected on 5,362 of them, a 6.8% connect rate. If your team is cold calling fintech or insurtech lists and landing meaningfully below that, the issue is usually list quality or calling windows before it's the pitch. Compliance and finance buyers screen harder than most verticals, so 6.8% at volume is a fair number to hold your own SDRs against.

What a Qualified Meeting Looks Like

Of those 5,362 connections, 1,443 turned into ICP conversations lasting 60 seconds or more, and 75 of those became booked meetings. That's a 5.2% ICP-to-booking rate.

If you've talked to agencies quoting 10-20% ICP-to-booking, ours will look low next to that. The difference is what counts as a booking. A lot of agencies count anything placed on a calendar, including tentative slots weeks out that quietly fall apart. We only book inside 7 days, never tentative, and only once the prospect has qualified on the call itself. That's why our raw rate looks lower, and why the meetings actually hold: 71% of last week's bookings were set within 7 days of the call, median 5 days out. Of the meetings booked in the last 30 days that have already happened, 92% were qualified by the client on the call, 61 held meetings we can stand behind. On our longest-running fintech campaign it's 93%, 26 of 28 held meetings over 60 days.

What Your Buyers Are Saying

• One buyer asked us directly this week why we'd reached out to them at all. That's a good sign, not a red flag. It meant the outreach was specific enough to notice, and the honest answer traced back to a real reason, not a scraped list.
• The objection we keep hearing when a sales leader is weighing hiring their own SDR instead of outsourcing: roughly $120K before that hire books a single meeting, a 3-4 month ramp, average tenure of 14 months, and a bad hire costs about $60K plus an empty pipeline on top. That math is what's pushing more fintech and insurtech leaders toward paying per meeting instead.

One Thing to Use Today

Pull your own connect rate from last week and set it against 6.8%. If you're materially under it, don't touch the script yet. Check calling windows and list freshness first. Most low connect rates are a targeting problem wearing a pitch problem's clothes.

From the Blog

• Reg Tech Buyers Aren't a Single Market
• Generic Reps Can't Sell Niche Markets (Here's Why)
• Why Cold Callers Should Sound Like Friends, Not Salespeople

Talk It Through

We only take on a limited number of new campaigns per cohort, on the 1st and the 15th. If it's useful, book 15 minutes at cal.com/cormac-repman/15min, no pressure either way.