Deal origination benchmarks from 1.7M outreach emails.

Most funds set expectations for an origination programme off a vendor's sales deck or a rule of thumb from the last hire. These deal origination benchmarks come from a platform that is actually running, and they answer the three questions buyers ask most: what reply rate is normal, how much one campaign produces, and how long it takes before the first owner says yes to a conversation.

The honest version also says what the data cannot tell you, so that is in here too.

Where these numbers come from

Everything below comes from Danish Lead Co.'s outreach platform, the infrastructure DealSource Systems runs on. Two datasets, with different windows, and it matters which is which:

• The platform view: 1,748,403 emails across 519 campaigns in the 90 days to 21 September 2026, aggregated and anonymised.
• The campaign view: 67 campaigns launched between late April and late July 2026, each followed for its first 60 days. This is the set used for the per-campaign and time-to-first-reply numbers.

One caveat up front, because it changes how you should read all of it. This is platform-wide outreach, not outreach filtered to acquisition targets. The recipients are mostly owner-operated businesses, and the most responsive sectors in the window included water damage restoration, medical spas, property management and home inspection, all of which are active roll-up categories. But these emails were mostly offering a service, not proposing an acquisition. Treat the numbers as a strong read on how owner-operators respond to cold outreach, not as an M&A-only benchmark.

What reply rate is normal at real volume?

Across the 90-day window the overall reply rate was 1.07%, against a 2.21% bounce rate. That counts every reply, including out-of-office notices.

• Reply rate falls as volume scales. Sends quadrupled from March to April and reply rate settled from about 1.8% to about 1.1%. The earliest, best-fit segment of any list gets worked first.
• Bounce rate moves before reply rate does. It went from under 1% to over 2% by mid-year. On a programme scaling fast, list quality degrades before anything else looks wrong.
• A reply rate with no volume next to it is not a benchmark. "Our partner gets 2%" on 500 emails and on 50,000 emails are different claims.

What does one campaign actually produce in its first 60 days?

This is the question the platform totals cannot answer, so we measured it per campaign.

A positive reply here means the owner or decision-maker replied with meeting interest, proposed a time, asked to book, asked for a call, asked for information, or raised a question worth answering. Declines, out-of-office notices, wrong-person replies and auto-replies are excluded.

Across the 67 campaigns, each of which sent at least 1,000 emails in its first 60 days:

• The median campaign produced 3 positive replies in its first 60 days. The average is higher, around 10, because a handful of campaigns do very well. The median is the number to plan around.
• About one campaign in seven produced none. That is the real failure rate of a first attempt at a new segment, and it is why a thesis gets tested before it gets scaled.
• Volume per campaign is not the right unit to compare vendors on. A campaign is one target list and one angle. Most origination programmes run several at once, and the number that matters is how many of them are working by week six.

How long until the first qualified conversation?

Measured from the day each campaign started sending to the day its first positive reply arrived:

For campaigns that got one, the median time to the first positive reply was 4 to 5 days.

We checked that these numbers do not depend on how the sample was cut. Requiring different levels of reply-classification coverage moved every figure by only a few points, which is why they are given as rounded ranges rather than false precision.

The practical reading: if a campaign has nothing by day 14, the odds are against it. About one campaign in five is in that position, and roughly two in three of those still had nothing at day 60. The right move is to change the list or the angle rather than wait. Any origination partner should be able to tell you on day 14, not day 90, whether a segment is working. We set out what a well-run start looks like week by week in the first 90 days of deal origination.

A single mandate lines up with this. The healthcare investment bank in our Merritt Healthcare Advisors engagement has run nine campaigns since mid-June. Of the six that have produced a positive reply, the first one arrived between the same day and eight days after launch, with a median under two days. The three that have not are all reruns of earlier lists or a referral-led variant, which is its own lesson: a list that has already been worked does not behave like a fresh one. The same engagement reached 14 qualified founder conversations in its first three weeks and 133 within 90 days.

Does target company size change the timing?

Barely. Grouping the 62 campaigns that recorded a target company size by the employee count of the companies they targeted:

Every band sits between three and five and a half days. Some bands hold only six or eight campaigns, which is too few to rank them on how many replies they produce, so we are not going to. For how reply share varies by company size across the whole platform, see our separate reply rates by company size analysis.

What we cannot give you is a split by deal size. The honest proxy would be the target companies' revenue, and revenue bands are recorded on too few campaigns to use. Employee count is the closest thing the data supports, and it is labelled as exactly that above.

How many positive replies become booked meetings?

Across the same 90-day platform window there were 3,035 positive replies and 915 first-time meetings booked from outbound. That counts each meeting once however many times it was rescheduled, and it excludes cancellations. That is roughly 30% of positive replies turning into a booked meeting.

Treat that as a floor. A small number of meetings booked from cold email do not get matched back to the campaign that produced them, so the true rate is slightly higher.

The gap between an owner replying with interest and an owner getting on a call is where follow-up process earns its fee. It is also the number most vendor pitches leave out.

How much comes from follow-up rather than the first email?

About half. Of the 597 positive replies where the sequence step was recorded, the initial email produced 302 (51%), the first follow-up 145 (24%) and the second follow-up 150 (25%). Follow-ups produced 49% of the positive replies.

That is a subset, since the step is not recorded on every reply, but it is large enough to be clear. A programme judged only on its first touch is being judged on half its result.

Do owners and founders reply more than other titles?

Yes. Seniority was recorded on 733 positive replies in the window. Founders, owners, partners, C-suite and C-team titles together account for 405 of them, or 55%. Founders alone are 27%, the largest single group by a distance.

That is the closest honest read this data gives on owner response. It is not a clean response rate, since seniority is not captured on every reply, but it confirms that the people authorised to have the conversation reply out of proportion to how few of them exist inside any company. It matches what our owner outreach benchmarks for acquisitions found from a different angle.

How to read deal origination benchmarks from anyone

1. 1. Ask for the unit. Per email, per campaign, per mandate or per month are four different numbers, and vendors move between them freely.
2. 2. Ask what counts as a reply. Out-of-office notices inflate a raw reply rate. Positive replies are the number that predicts pipeline.
3. 3. Ask for the median, not the average. Our average campaign produces about three times what our median campaign does. An average quoted without a median is flattering by construction.
4. 4. Ask what the day-14 checkpoint is. If a partner cannot tell you by then whether a segment is working, they are not measuring it.

The cost side of the same question is in what deal origination actually costs, and fee structures are compared in retainer versus success fee. If you are weighing whether to build this in-house, outsourced versus in-house origination covers that decision.

Key Terms Glossary

Frequently asked questions

What to do with this

Plan around roughly 1% reply rates at volume, three positive replies per campaign in the first 60 days, and a first qualified reply inside a week on most campaigns that are going to work. Put a checkpoint at day 14. Expect about half your results to come from follow-up, and about three in ten positive replies to become meetings.

These deal origination benchmarks will be refreshed as the data grows. What the data cannot yet tell you is how any of this varies with the size of the deal itself. We would rather publish that gap than a guess. For how a DealSource engagement is run against these numbers, see how it works.