Results and timelines

Booked calls start after two waits: about 15 days of setup before the first message goes out, then replies and booked calls can land inside the first 30 days after that. Setup covers the sender profiles, the offer, the website copy and the lists, and it produces nothing you can screenshot. It is also the one stage we will not shorten. Sending early only burns part of the list, and a weak result then cannot be traced to the message, the targeting or the profile behind it. For what came after setup elsewhere, see the month-one call counts we publish.

Replies come first, usually within the first month of sending, and at that stage they are mostly feedback: which angle gets answered, which industry ignores you, which job title replies and which one forwards you on. Booked calls follow as those replies are qualified, and signed contracts arrive at the speed your buyers decide. In one 30-day stretch for a client running LinkedIn and email together, 2,187 people contacted produced 309 replies, 14 booked calls with 11 completed, and 2 signed contracts. That is one campaign; other timelines ran faster or slower.

LinkedIn replies can arrive as soon as the first connection requests are accepted, though the sender's profile is rebuilt before any request goes out. One US business consulting firm booked 27 calls in its first month of LinkedIn outreach, 35 in the second and 64 in the third. When the numbers justify more, we add LinkedIn accounts, each working its own slice of the market, instead of pushing one account harder. How we set up and scale the channel is on our LinkedIn outreach service page.

The quickest start we have published is a financial services firm that booked 26 calls in its first seven days of sending and signed four contracts inside that same week. That says more about the demand already waiting in that market than about anything we wrote. It is a fast one, and we quote it with that caveat every time. Do not set expectations by the fastest case you have read, ours included; plan against the slower ramps in the rest of our case studies.

Smirnov Consulting Group has published results ranging from a handful of six-figure contracts to hundreds of booked calls over a year. A UK design agency booked 796 sales calls over 12 months from LinkedIn outreach. At the fast end, one campaign produced 119 sales meetings in 14 days. Both are single campaigns, not averages, and the industry pages carry more. The rest of the set is on our case studies page.

Yes, and with the funnel rather than a headline. Our case studies show the numbers behind each result: messages sent and on which channels, replies, booked sales calls and the period it took. Several break the result down month by month, so a slower first month sits next to the stronger ones that followed. Clients are identified by industry and country, never by name. Whichever agency you hire, ask for that breakdown before you sign, because a testimonial without a number and a timeframe tells you nothing. Ours is on the case study page.

Our campaigns are sized for anywhere from 10 to 100+ qualified sales calls a month, and the monthly call counts we publish fall across that whole range. Where yours lands depends on the size of your market, how many LinkedIn accounts and mailboxes run at once, and how many calls your team can take. That last limit is the one people skip: a meeting booked three weeks out with a buyer who has forgotten why they agreed is a wasted meeting. If your calendar is already full, say so before we start and we build to a smaller number.

A realistic range is about 1% typically, or as low as 0.5% once you are sending at real scale, thousands of emails a day, because the bigger the volume, the lower the average reply rate runs. Tightly personalized, highly specific campaigns can reach 15% to 17%, with roughly three in four of those repliers genuinely interested, but that is the ceiling, not the plan. Copy is worth maybe a few points of reply rate, while the list and what prospects find when they look up the sender move it far more. Our published campaigns put reply counts next to the number of people contacted.

We do not set an open-rate target, because tracked opens are too unreliable to promise anything on. The low end still tells you something: a very low rate usually means mail is landing in spam or the list is stale, and that gets fixed before anyone rewrites a subject line, which is the last thing we look at. Our cold email campaigns are judged on replies, booked calls and signed contracts instead.

In our campaigns it takes somewhere between 150 and 250 contacted people to produce one booked call, a meeting rate of roughly 0.4% to 0.7%. The niche, the country and the channel decide where you land inside that range. Count people, not companies: in a small market we reach several decision-makers per company, so fewer companies can carry the same number of calls. For planning, multiply the calls you want by 200 to get the number of people you need to reach.

For a high-ticket B2B service, we consider a closing ratio above 20% of calls healthy. In one 30-day LinkedIn campaign with email follow-ups, 16 prospects booked, 12 showed up and 3 signed, a quarter of the calls that actually happened. Closing is your team's half of the funnel: we qualify the replies and book the meetings, and your people run the sales call. If your ratio is low now, more volume usually pushes it lower, because new calls bring colder and more skeptical buyers. Compare your own numbers with other published campaigns before setting a target.

No single average applies, but the clients we work with typically sell deals of USD 10,000 and up, often six or seven figures, since outbound pays for itself fastest at higher deal sizes. A UK client selling into the UK and the US closed 8 deals averaging $70,000 in two months. Low-value deals with no renewals rarely carry the cost of a campaign plus your team's time, so run the numbers on your own deal size before you commit. Contract values from other campaigns give you reference points.

We measure every campaign on six numbers: people contacted, replies, interested replies, calls booked, calls that actually happened and deals signed. Booked calls alone flatter any campaign, so held calls and signed deals are counted separately. The ratios between stages show where to act. Few replies usually point to the list or the sender's profile, and replies without bookings to the offer or the reply handling. No-shows point to the gap before the meeting, and held calls that never close point to the sales process. Real campaign funnels show what those ratios look like in practice.

A successful campaign produces signed clients at a volume your team can deliver and at deal values that justify the cost of the calls. For one company that means 100+ calls a month; for another, five to ten good new clients a month is the whole goal, and the process is the same with a smaller list. It should also leave you with a record of what your market responds to. The meetings are this quarter's revenue, and that record pays every quarter after it. We publish campaigns at very different volumes.

Results climb over the first months when someone is actively working the campaign. The winning sequences from month one get more volume, the losing ones get cut, the lists get sharper and more accounts come online. One B2B tech company went from zero qualified calls to more than 40 a month within 90 days. No single month is dramatic, and nobody finds a magic subject line. The curve is slow, then obvious, then boring, and the month-by-month ramps we publish trace that shape.

Ninety days is enough to know whether outbound works for your business, so give it at least that long before you judge it, and longer if your sales cycle runs past three months. Judging earlier misreads normal noise: if you only track replies you will panic in week two, and if you only track contracts you will quit in week three. Hundreds of replies produce dozens of conversations, which produce a handful of contracts, and that narrowing is the normal shape. Compare it with the funnels in our published campaigns.

Part of the outcome can be forecast before launch, and part cannot. The inputs are arithmetic: how many people your sending capacity reaches each month, set against how big your market is. If the market is small next to that capacity, the plan has to change before launch, not after. Nobody can honestly forecast which message will win or how fast your buyers decide. The free strategy session at Smirnov Consulting Group works out expected results from those inputs, and past campaigns give you real numbers to check them against.

Outbound pays back on the timeline of your own sales cycle. Model two curves: booked calls climb first, and revenue follows at the distance of that cycle, which you are probably underestimating by a month. Add about 15 days of setup before the first send. Month six is usually when you see what the system is worth. Starting late costs more than a month, too: companies that wait out November and December often see their pipeline move only in March. Set that timeline against the costs on our pricing page.

There is no honest average ROI figure to publish, because returns swing with your deal size and how long your buyers take to decide. Single campaigns show what is possible rather than typical: one B2B client got 86 qualified leads and more than $900,000 in new revenue in two months. Returns also keep arriving after the campaign month, since in high-ticket B2B some calls that produced nothing at the time sign months later. Judge a campaign on month-one contracts alone and you will cancel one that was working. Other clients' results come with their timeframes.

If the first months stay quiet, we find the stage where the funnel breaks and fix that before adding volume or rewriting copy. A German IT company came to us with its own outreach producing almost nothing. We rebuilt the sequences across LinkedIn, warm email (to people who had already seen them on LinkedIn) and cold email, put a person on the replies, and the company signed 5 new contracts in 35 days. Your commercial options at that point are set by the contract: no minimum length, though we recommend at least three months, and one month's notice either way. See more client results.

Renewal timing follows the same terms as the rest of the contract: no fixed minimum, one month's notice, and Smirnov Consulting Group plans campaigns to outlast at least one full sales cycle. A clear offer aimed at one audience needs about twelve months to prove itself, because four weeks with a new offer only tells you it is new. If you expect to pause the campaign whenever things get busy, tell us before signing: we would rather not start than stop halfway. Several of our twelve-month campaigns show what a full year of sending produced.