At a company with about 50 employees or fewer, cold email the founder or CEO. Above that size, cold email the department head who owns the problem you solve: the VP, director or head of that function.
Then check that choice against the people who signed your last few deals. Your own record beats any general rule, this one included.
The split comes from one outbound agency's analysis of 1 million of its own cold emails, sent between April and October 2025. That is a vendor measuring its own sending, so I read it as one strong signal and then check it against real deals.
C-level contacts gave positive replies at 0.27%, directors at 0.088%. About 3x. But 70% of those positive C-level replies came from companies with 1 to 50 employees. So most of the CEO advantage lives in small companies.
What 1 million cold emails say about CEOs and directors
The report compared C-level contacts (CEOs, founders, CTOs) with directors across 1.2 million B2B contacts and nearly 40,000 replies. It counts a reply as positive when the person is interested, asks questions or asks for more information.
| Measure (1-million-email dataset, April to October 2025) | C-level | Director |
|---|---|---|
| Positive reply rate | 0.27% | 0.088% |
| Total reply rate | 1.61% | 1.68% |
| Share of replies that were positive | 16.76% | 5.20% |
The positive rate is per contact emailed. For the C-level group, that is 1,202 positive replies from about 445,000 executives.
Read the middle row first. Both groups reply at almost the same rate, between 1.6% and 1.7%. What changes is what the reply says. About one C-level reply in six was positive. For directors, about one in twenty.
Total reply rate is quantity. Share of positive replies is quality. Same thing I say about lead lists: you need both. Watch only the total and two groups that reply equally often look equal. One of them is worth far more of your time.
So yes, the headline number favors the CEO. Anyone telling you to skip the CEO entirely has to explain it. The company-size data in the next section does.
Why the CEO edge shrinks as the company grows
Here is where those 1,202 positive C-level replies came from, by headcount. Two bands (501 to 1,000 and 5,001 to 10,000 employees) are not listed in the report, so the rows add up to 999, and about 200 replies sit in bands it does not show.
| Headcount band | Share of all 1,202 | Positive C-level replies |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 10 | 44.3% | 532 |
| 11 to 50 | 26.4% | 317 |
| 51 to 200 | 9.3% | 112 |
| 201 to 500 | 2.2% | 26 |
| 1,001 to 5,000 | 0.7% | 9 |
| Over 10,000 | 0.2% | 3 |
Careful with this table. It counts where the positive replies came from. It does not give a reply rate inside each band, and part of the pattern may simply reflect how many small-company founders were on the lists to begin with.
Even so: 3 positive C-level replies from companies above 10,000 people. That is clear enough. The report draws the same line in its own advice: aim at founder-led companies of 1 to 50 employees and avoid Fortune 500 CEOs whose assistants filter the inbox.
The other side of the argument comes from a practitioner. Hugo Pochet, who sells an outreach tool, argues on his Substack that executive inboxes "can receive up to 50 cold emails a week", while a manager a few levels down gets a fraction of that.
In his experience "it's a middle manager who tests the product, runs it against the existing workflow, and brings a recommendation to leadership."
He gives no number behind the inbox-volume claim. The middle-manager point comes from "thousands of deals," with no other detail, so treat both as experienced opinion, not measured data. It fits the table, though. The bigger the company, the further the CEO sits from the tool, the vendor and the budget line you are asking about.
A simple rule by company size
Put the two sources together and you get a starting rule. Test it against your own deals before you build a list on it.
| Headcount | Email first | What supports it |
|---|---|---|
| 1-10 | Founder, CEO or owner | 44.3% of positive C-level replies came from this band |
| 11-50 | Founder or CEO | Another 26.4%; the report's own advice stops at 50 |
| 51-200 | Head of the department that owns the problem, unless your past deals say the founder signs | C-level share falls to 9.3% |
| 201+ | VP, director or head of function | Each listed band above 200 holds 2.2% or less of positive C-level replies |
The small-company half of this rule is nothing new for me. In an April 2023 post about LinkedIn targeting, my example of who to go after was "decision-makers (CEOs, Founders, Owners, Directors) in small companies (1-10 or 10-50 employees)". Same cut-off at 50, two years before that 2025 sample.
When the owner signs, the owner goes on the list. One of our financial-advisory clients is a good example: we targeted owners directly, across different industries.
How that kind of program ramps up over the first few months is covered in what to expect from a new outbound program.
One thing the table cannot show: the same title means different jobs at different sizes. A VP of Sales at a 12-person startup may be the only salesperson. At 3,000 people a VP of Sales usually runs a team and a budget.
Which title in a function signs the deal shifts as the company grows, a point I go into in how I choose a market for outbound.
Check the rule against your last ten deals
A published dataset tells you about a million emails from other companies. Your own closed deals tell you about your buyers. When the two disagree, your deals win.
This check catches a common mistake. In April 2024 I listed why most B2B companies struggle to get clients from outbound, and one line on that list was blunt: "they contact the wrong people that are not even decision-makers". No message fixes a list like that.
This is where I start a target list. In a November 2023 post about IT and software clients I put it this way: "ideally you target the roles you're 100% sure about, take a look at your past projects, find out who was the decision maker."
Here is the short version you can run in an hour:
- Write down your last 10 closed deals.
- Next to each, note the company headcount and the title of the person who signed.
- If you know it, also note the title of the person who first took the call.
- Group the rows by headcount band and look for the title that repeats.
If 7 of your 10 deals were signed by a head of operations at companies of 100 to 300 people, that is your target, whatever any study says about CEOs. If your small clients were all signed by the founder, the data and your history agree, and you can move faster.
Then look for more companies that resemble your paying clients, both in headcount and in the problem they were trying to fix. That second step is what turns ten deals into a list.
Which job titles stay on the list and which go
Picking the title is half the job. The other half is making sure the list actually contains it. From my piece on why the list, and not the email, is usually the problem:
"Titles nobody cleaned. Pull any scraped list and you will find 'Assistant', 'Associate', and a wall of people called 'Manager' who manage a calendar. If your buyer is a CTO, a VP of Sales, a CMO, a founder or an owner, those are the titles you keep. The rest get excluded on purpose, not by accident."
A generic "Manager" filter is an easy way for a department-head strategy to turn into a list of junior staff. Use the real titles for your niche instead. For IT and software buyers, my own example list has included Head of IT, Director of IT, CTO and VP of IT Strategy.
Build the list in a proper data source such as Sales Navigator, Apollo, UpLead, ZoomInfo or RocketReach, where you can filter by title and headcount together, instead of buying a scraped file. Then do one manual pass: sort by title, read the unique values, and delete anything that could not sign or recommend a deal.
| Keep | Cut |
|---|---|
| Founder, CEO, owner (small companies) | Assistant |
| VP, head or director of the function you serve | Associate |
| CTO, CMO or VP of Sales when that is who signed before | Generic "Manager" with no function attached |
| The exact title that repeats in your last 10 deals | Titles that do not appear in any deal you closed |
How the email changes with the title
The person changes, so the email changes. Two things stay the same at every level: keep it short, and ask for a conversation instead of trying to sell the service in one message.
Smirnov Consulting Group is a Prague-based B2B outbound lead generation agency that runs cold email and LinkedIn campaigns for founder-led B2B companies and books qualified sales calls. My team uses the first message to earn a short call and leaves the pitch for the call.
A founder at a 20-person company owns the revenue, the hiring and the problem at the same time. Write about the business result and keep it to a few lines:
Subject: [company] and [problem]
Hi [first name], we help [type of company] with [specific problem]. For [similar company], that meant [real result with a number].
Worth a 15-minute call to see if the same applies at [company]?
A department head at a 400-person company owns a number inside the business and has to defend any new vendor to someone above them. Write about their metric, and give them something they can pass upward:
Subject: [their metric] at [company]
Hi [first name], most [their title]s I speak with at companies your size are dealing with [specific problem in their function]. We fixed that for [similar company] and [real result with a number].
Would a short call be useful? If it helps your internal case, I can send the one-page summary first.
Fill the brackets with real proof, or cut the line.
Department heads also need more touches and more than one channel. From the same November 2023 post about IT clients:
"The decision makers like VP of IT, Head of IT - they don't use LinkedIn 24/7, so email follow ups can increase your conversions like crazy."
Five or six touches is the working minimum, as I explain in how my team sequences follow-ups. Whoever receives them will also look up the sender, so decide whose name the sequence goes out under before the first send.
Questions founders ask about this
Is it worth cold emailing the CEO of a very small company?
Yes. In the 1-million-email dataset, 44.3% of positive C-level replies came from companies with 1 to 10 employees, and its own advice is to target founder-led companies of 1 to 50 people. Email the founder directly.
Is it ever worth cold emailing the CEO of a large company?
Rarely as the first contact. That dataset counted only 3 positive C-level replies from companies above 10,000 employees and advises against emailing Fortune 500 CEOs whose inboxes are filtered. Start with the head of the function.
What job title should I target if I sell to IT departments?
Look at who signed your past IT deals first. Common signers are the VP of IT strategy, head of IT, director of IT and sometimes the CTO. Which one fits depends on the company size you sell to.
Should I email the CEO and the department head at the same company?
Sometimes, but only after the first title is settled. Pick it with the company-size rule above, then check it against your own last ten deals. How many people to add per company depends on how many companies your market actually holds: small markets need several decision-makers per company.