The outbound metrics that lie to you
Open rates are dead. Reply rates are gamed. Here's the one metric that actually predicts revenue.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection killed open rates in 2021. Every tool still reports them, and every VP of sales still uses them to grade reps. The number is fiction.
Reply rate is closer to real, but easy to game. A 40% reply rate on 'not interested' replies is worse than a 6% reply rate that includes 3 booked meetings.
The metric that predicts revenue is 'qualified conversation rate': percentage of contacted prospects who reply positively AND fit your ICP AND agree to a next step. This number is usually 0.8% to 3.5% on well-run campaigns.
Track it weekly. It's the only outbound metric where improvement always translates to pipeline. Everything else is either vanity (opens) or lagging (revenue).