The three numbers that tell you whether your outreach is working
Sent count is a vanity metric. Acceptance rate, reply rate and meeting rate are the ones that change what you do next.
The easiest number to report is how many requests you sent. It is also the least useful, because it goes up whether or not anything is working. Three other numbers actually tell you what to change.
1. Acceptance rate
Accepted connections divided by requests sent. This measures your targeting and your profile, in that order. If acceptance is low, the problem is almost never your message — it is who you are asking, or what your profile looks like when they check it. Sending more requests does not fix a low acceptance rate; it just produces more rejections.
2. Reply rate
Replies divided by messages sent. This measures the first line. Once someone accepts, you have a short window and a short message to give them a reason to answer. A reply rate that is low while acceptance is healthy means the message is the problem, not the list.
3. Meeting rate
Meetings booked divided by conversations. This is the one that pays for the tool, and it is the one most dashboards omit because it is the hardest to compute — it requires knowing that a conversation turned into a meeting, which means either marking it yourself or inferring it from what was said. Ours is marked explicitly on the contact record, so the number is a fact rather than a guess.
Reading them together
- Low acceptance, low reply: targeting problem. Narrow the list.
- Healthy acceptance, low reply: message problem. Rewrite the opening line.
- Healthy acceptance and reply, low meetings: the conversation is pleasant but has no next step. Ask for the meeting explicitly.
- Everything healthy and volume low: now, and only now, raise the volume — gradually, staying inside the weekly cap.
This is why the analytics page leads with rates rather than totals, and why it shows all three side by side. A single number cannot tell you what to change; the relationship between them can.