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Glossary entry

Positive reply rate

The percentage of contacted prospects who reply with intent to engage further — meeting accepted, follow-up question, request for info. Excludes 'not interested,' 'wrong person,' auto-replies, and angry responses. The metric that actually predicts pipeline; raw reply rate is a vanity number by comparison. Industry median 0.5-2%; signal-anchored sequences hit 3-6%; the best operators land 8%+. Tracking this requires manual tagging or an LLM classifier on every reply, which is why most teams skip it.

Category: Metrics Reading time: 2 min

01Definition

TLDR
The percentage of contacted prospects who reply with intent to engage further — meeting accepted, follow-up question, request for info. Excludes 'not interested,' 'wrong person,' auto-replies, and angry responses. The metric that actually predicts pipeline; raw reply rate is a vanity number by comparison. Industry median 0.5-2%; signal-anchored sequences hit 3-6%; the best operators land 8%+. Tracking this requires manual tagging or an LLM classifier on every reply, which is why most teams skip it.

02Why it matters

Distinguishes 'replied' from 'wants to talk' — the only difference that turns into pipeline.

03Example

Worked example
45 replies on a 1,000-send sequence; only 12 said 'tell me more.' Positive reply rate: 1.2%.
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