How I reached a 36.3% reply rate

In today’s issue, I’ll share how I reached a 36.3% reply rate, and booked 3 meetings, only 2 days after starting prospecting.

Most salespeople are struggling to book meetings through outbound these days. They try moonshots and only focus on landing meetings with C-level at Fortune 500 companies. That’s a recipe for failure in 2025.

So, today, I’m going to show you I find prospects to contact, start conversations, and book meetings that turn into real opportunities. Without having to wait for weeks to get a reply.

Let’s dive in:

Step 1: Ask yourself these 4 questions

I always recommend mixing total strangers (prospects) and people you know when starting a prospecting campaign. This will help you get more answers faster, because a part of your list is made of people who have already heard from you.

Here are 4 questions you can ask yourself to find people you’ve been in touch with:

• Who did I speak to, but wasn’t interested at the moment? → closed lost opportunities
• Who recently commented or reacted to my/someone else’s posts? → people with potential problem you can help with
• Who recently visited my profile? → people who were potentially looking for information
• Who’s a really close person I can contact to get insights? → potential for introductions

Step 2: Build your lists

Now that you have 4 different tiers of prospects, you can start building a list in your sales engagement tool. I personally have experience working with Amplemarket and La Growth Machine, and they have som pretty advanced segmentation features for your lists.

These lists should be segmented, based on the questions you’ve asked yourself in step 1. I recommend to do a bit of list building every day instead of building a massive list. If you use your posts or other people’s post, new prospects will pop daily, so you can keep feeding your list as you go. The same is valid with profile viewers.

Step 3: Contact them where they are

This final part is critical. Most salespeople would take a list and drop it in a standardized sequence. It used to work in 2018, but in 2025, you need to be more agile.

For example, I contacted people on the following channels:

• LinkedIn
• Email
• Whatsapp
• Limelight (I had a chat with a prospect who used to work with me)

I’ve been going back to my past conversations with every single person, and I reached out to them where they replied last. This is a critical step to start more conversations.

Another important point is the way I wrote my messages. I avoided using long sentences or buzzwords and wrote like I speak.

I contacted 22 people, got 8 replies, and booked 3 meetings from these conversations. When prospecting, never forget that a dollar from a stranger is worth the same as a dollar from someone you know. And it’s easier to reach out to people you know than total strangers.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut