# Outbound sales terms, defined by an operator > Twenty-two cold outreach terms defined the way they are used by someone running LinkedIn outbound daily, each carrying our own measured number: accept rate, cohort maturity, warm-up ramp, refusal, invitation note. Page: https://re-vault.io/glossary/ ## Outbound sales terms, defined by an operator Twenty-two terms from cold LinkedIn outreach, each defined the way it is used by someone running it daily, and carrying our own number where we have one. Figures recomputed 30 August 2026. ## Definitions ### Operated outreach Outbound where the operating is the product: sourcing, copy, sending, pacing, replies and the weekly read all sit with the provider, and the client takes the meetings. Priced monthly rather than per seat or per credit. ### Accept rate The share of connection invitations that become a connection. Ours is 21.5%, from 158 accepts on 734 invitations sent 10 to 23 August 2026, each with at least seven days to be answered. Below 20% on a cold audience, the profile and the audience match matter more than the message. ### Reply rate The share of people who write something back after a first direct message. The published benchmark for cold LinkedIn is 14.1%. Ours is 20.3%, from 38 replies among 187 people first messaged between 30 July and 22 August 2026. ### Denominator The count a rate was calculated from. A rate without one is a claim; with one it is a measurement. Under 30 sends or 3 replies in a slice, the gap between two variants is noise. ### Cohort maturity The age of a batch when you judge it. Across 226 of our accepts the median arrived 2.4 hours after the invitation and the 95th percentile at 4.9 days, so five days catches about 95% and anything younger is held out of comparisons. ### Signal A dated event that gives you a reason to write this week: a role opened three days ago, a funding filing that named the executives, a launch, a post where someone described the problem out loud. If the first line would still be true a year from now, it is a description. ### Checkable fact The one verifiable thing about the reader that a first message carries, with its source stored beside it. On some signals a third of a sourced list is dropped here for having no fact worth writing about. ### Batch tag The label that ties a group of sends to one signal, one segment and one date. Without it, a reply rate cannot be attributed to anything, and the weekly read has nothing to compare. ### Sending profile One LinkedIn account doing the sending, with its own ceiling, its own working window and its own warm-up history. We run 14 active profiles, 6 of them premium. Volume scales by adding profiles rather than by pushing one harder. ### Warm-up ramp The climb a new sending profile makes from 1 invitation a day to 10 across ten working days. Its first twenty invitations returned 15.4% accepts against 21.0% from invitation twenty-one onward, so those first twenty are held out of every verdict. ### Governor The single component that physically sends. It holds the daily limits, the working hours, the jitter and the ramp, and it spreads the day's volume across the whole working window at a maximum of one cold touch per profile per minute. ### Pacing Spreading a day's sends across its whole working window instead of firing the quota in the first hour. Our 1,562 invitations are spread across 207 distinct hours of the day. ### Refusal A temporary decline from the platform with a cooldown attached, usually 30 to 60 minutes on that profile. It costs one attempt rather than a day. Our refusal rate moved from 6.5% of attempts to 0.4% in eight days after two pacing changes. ### Invitation note The message attached to a connection request. On a basic account the allowance is about five a month, and 66% of our noted invitations from basic accounts were refused against 0.3% with no note. From premium profiles: 309 noted invitations, zero refusals. ### Withdrawal Cancelling a pending invitation that was never answered. It clears the pending queue immediately, and the platform holds that person for about three weeks before they can be invited again. We withdrew 2,501 between 13 and 29 August 2026. ### InMail A paid message that reaches someone without a connection, sent from a premium seat. Useful for the people who read profiles and ignore invitations. We have sent 71 of them since 23 July 2026. ### Open profile A LinkedIn setting that lets anyone message the person directly without a connection or a paid credit. Worth checking before spending an InMail, because a portion of any senior list has it switched on. ### First-degree network The people a profile is already connected to. Buyers hide in there in small numbers: in a network of 3,702 connections we found 76 people who match the buyer definition, measured 27 August 2026. ### Role mailbox An address like hr@, info@ or careers@. It is a route rather than a contact, and a company counts as open when a person's name is known. Treating a role mailbox as a warm contact cost us five days and a referral once. ### Fully loaded cost What a seat costs once employer load, tools, ramp and management time are added to compensation. For one US mid-market SDR seat in 2026 that lands at $110,000 to $145,000 a year, or $9,000 to $12,000 a month. ### Ramp The months between a hire starting and producing a data point worth trusting. Published benchmarks put it at about three months for this role, and payroll runs the whole time, which makes it the largest single line in year one. ### MCP access Model Context Protocol access: your own Claude or ChatGPT connected to the outreach stack with one token, reading your audience, your queue, your sent messages, your conversations and your numbers. From $199 a month for one LinkedIn account, $499 for four, and the token sees one workspace, yours. ## Where these numbers come from Every figure above was recomputed from our own engine database on 30 August 2026: 14 active LinkedIn sending profiles, 1,562 invitations sent between 27 July and 28 August, 576 direct messages, and every send, accept and reply written to one place. The definitions behind the two headline rates are on the [benchmarks page](https://re-vault.io/benchmarks/), and the platform limits behind the pacing terms are on the [LinkedIn limits page](https://re-vault.io/linkedin-limits/). ### Want this running on your own pipeline? Book a 30-minute call. Tell me who you need to reach and I will say plainly whether this is a fit. --- Re:Vault runs LinkedIn outreach end to end for B2B companies: finds the buyers, writes in the client's voice, handles replies, books meetings. $2,000/month, month to month. - Book a 30-minute call: https://cal.com/dmitry.o/re-vault-gtm - Email: dmitry@re-vault.io - Index of every page for agents: https://re-vault.io/llms.txt