Outbound Sequence Benchmarks for 2025
In which I painstakingly aggregate numbers from the Internet so you don't have to.
This is actually my 52nd Uncharted Territory article. That’s a full year of weekly1 posts. Thank you all for reading!
Today I want to answer a question that you might think would be straightforward in 2025: What does a good outbound sequence look like?
Of course, if LinkedIn is to be believed, outbound is dead but also everyone is crushing outbound by finding GTM alpha and engineering the perfect signals to feed to their AI SDRs. Let’s just say I’m not sure LinkedIn is to be believed.
Meanwhile, in the real world, most sales teams are still focused on doing the basics well. Like many things in life, it’s (relatively) simple but not easy. They need a proper ICP, a good account list, good messaging and the discipline to run high-quality outbound sequences. This is especially true for those trying to get a primarily inbound team to start outbounding.
One thing that’s become pretty obvious to me recently is that many people aren’t really sure what constitutes a high-quality outbound sequence. And I just mean the basics—number of touches, number of contacts and duration.
The reason this issue is on my radar is that we recently launched pipeline creation analytics in Gradient Works. There’s one feature in particular folks really like: activity thresholds. We give teams the ability to codify their coverage expectations for their reps and then color code their accounts based on whether or not those expectations are met. Setup looks like this:
Basically we’re asking people to tell us about the sequences they expect their reps to run. It’s just a few simple questions:
How many touches?
How many contacts?
Over how long?
When we rolled this out, I expected folks to easily fill it in based on their own expectations. Not so much. We usually get a “well, what’s good?” or “what do other folks do?” I usually answer something along the lines of 12-15 touches per contact, for 2-3 contacts over 30 days. That’s roughly what I’ve seen in companies I’ve been a part of. It’s been bugging me, though, because I just don’t have great data to back that up.
So, I decided to fix that and share what I learned. Unfortunately, we’re not quite ready to do our own first-party study, so I did the next best thing and pulled all the data I could from the internet. Then I aggregated it to get a little wisdom of crowds.
Let’s look at the results.
Benchmarks on benchmarks
I reviewed 37 different sources which included everything from name brand analyst reports to vendor-sponsored research to outbound advice written by individuals.
For each source I pulled out their recommendations for touches per contact, sequence duration and number of contacts. When sources quoted ranges or made multiple suggestions, I included all the suggested metrics from each source.
You can see the full methodology and a link to all the sources at the end of this article.
Touches per Contact
25th percentile: 8
50th percentile: 11.65
75th percentile: 15
This metric had the most data with 52 data points across 24 sources. No real surprises here. The average ended up at 11.9 and the 75th percentile falls at 15. That’s right in line with my stock answer of 12-15 touches per contact.
Sequence Duration
25th percentile: 18.5 days
50th percentile: 22 days
75th percentile: 26.5 days
This one had 43 data points across 19 sources. You can see that the vast majority of recommendations land between between 15 and 35 days with ~3 weeks being the most common. There were a couple of very long sequences in the data. Those were aimed at C-level prospects.
Contacts
25th percentile: 5 contacts
50th percentile: 5.7 contacts
75th percentile: 7.18 contacts
This one had by far the sparsest data with only 10 values across 5 sources. In the raw data sources, there are a lot of references to the size of buying groups generally but I only included specific recommendations for the number of contacts to sequence in this chart. Overall, I’m surprised at the average of 6 contacts. That mostly tells me that the data sources here skew enterprise.
Methodology and Data
As I mentioned, I reviewed 37 different sources that ran the gamut from well-researched analyst reports to advice posts written by individuals. To get to this final list, I weeded out link-list posts in favor of posts that contained first-party information. The full list of sources and metrics is available here.
I gave each source a quality score as follows:
High - first-party research from either surveys or proprietary datasets (e.g. TOPO’s 2019 SDR Report and 6Sense’s Science of B2B BDR)
Medium - advice or example cadences written by well-known individuals or brands (e.g. Cognism’s advice or Salesloft’s Big Book of Cadences)
Low - advice or example cadences written by lesser-known authors
Most of the sources (28 of 37) were from the past 3 years. I did include some older sources, especially if they included original research (e.g. The Bridge Group’s historical data for SDR touches that goes back to 2014).
You can see the breakdown of sources by quality and date below.
I used AI to extract the metrics and then double checked each of them with good old fashioned human effort. When sources included ranges (e.g. 8-12 touches, 3-5 contacts) or multiple values for different suggested cadences, I included each value they provided in the overall metrics.
Wrapping up
The biggest weakness in this analysis is that I couldn’t really get a good breakdown by segment / ACV (i.e. SMB, Mid-Market and Enterprise) or persona. Obviously the sequence you use to break into the C-suite at a Fortune 500 company doesn’t look the same as the one you use to pique the interest of the owner of your local HVAC installer.
That said, I think this provides a solid direction for anyone trying to hold reps accountable for running impactful outbound sequences. Based on what I learned, I’ll probably update my activity threshold advice to be 8-15 touches over 3-4 weeks. I didn’t learn enough about contacts to update my thinking there so I’ll stick with 2-3 for most folks.
If you’ve been struggling to figure out what good looks like for your outbound sequences, I hope this helps. I also highly recommend digging into the sources and coming to your own conclusions.
It’s actually slightly longer than a year since the technical first post. I’ve taken a couple weeks off for holidays.