Fix sheet: Cold reply rate is below baseline
This sheet appended when your report flagged the `reply-rate` weakness.
What the numbers actually mean
Cold LinkedIn reply rate industry baseline is 5-12%. Below 5%, the sequence is leaving most of the pipeline on the table; below 2% the sequence is broken at touch 1 AND touch 2. Above 12% means either strong personalization is working or the audience is unusually warm.
The thing most teams miss: the bottleneck is almost always touch 2 and 3, not touch 1. Touch 1 gets people to accept; touches 2-4 are where the actual reply happens, and most teams write a great touch 1 and then template the rest.
The 3 things to fix this week
- Audit the gap between touch 1 and touch 2. Read your touch 2 message. If it starts with "thanks for connecting!", you have just wasted the warmest 30 seconds of attention you will ever get. Touch 2 should open with ONE specific question the prospect has an opinion on, framed in a sentence.
- Add touch 3 if it does not exist. 70% of B2B LinkedIn replies arrive between touches 2 and 4. Skipping touch 3 because "they did not reply to touch 2" leaves a majority of the pipeline on the table. Use the touch 3 template in the playbook — it acknowledges silence without apologising for it.
- Move to email by touch 4. Same conversation, different channel. Senior B2B targets read email more consistently than LinkedIn DMs once their inbox is crowded. The touch 4 template in the playbook is built for this — it references the LinkedIn exchange explicitly so the channel switch does not feel cold.
What "fixed" looks like
Combined sequence reply rate climbs to 8-15%. Distribution should spread across touches 2/3/4/5 — if all replies are on touch 2, the back-half is weak; if all replies are on touch 5, the early-half is weak. Even spread = healthy sequence.
How BIGM solves it
We generate the full 5-touch sequence from a single ICP brief — touches 2-4 get AI-rewritten per-prospect openers, and we re-write underperforming variants live based on per-tenant reply data. Replies compound on the back half of the sequence as designed, not on touch 1 luck.