The last year gave us more data than any year before and more questions to go with it. Cold email is still working, but the margin for error keeps shrinking. LinkedIn matured from an add-on into a primary outreach channel for many of our clients. Cold calling, which we added to our service mix in 2024, produced a full year of performance data for the first time. And for the first time in this report, we looked at all three channels side by side to understand how they interact as follow-up in omnichannel cadences.
This report is something we do every year at Belkins.
We take our campaign data, sit with it long enough to find what’s actually true, and reveal our findings to the public. We think the B2B community deserves benchmarks built on real sends, real dials, and real replies rather than estimates.
Here’s what went into this edition:
- Over 7.5 million cold emails
- 175,000+ calls logged through our Nooks dialer
- More than 15 million LinkedIn touchpoints from Expandi
- Anonymized contact-level data from 34 Belkins client campaigns
We looked at reply rates, connect rates, meeting conversion, follow-up sequencing, deliverability, timing, and more.
The findings aren’t always what you’d expect. Some channels outperformed the assumptions we brought into the year. Some underperformed in ways that changed how we think about sequencing.
If you run outreach, manage an SDR team, or are trying to figure out where to put your effort in 2026 and beyond — this is built for you.
