REFUTEDFinding 0001 · channel / sales · confidence: high
Dental cold email: 532 sends → 0 replies
- Hypothesis
- “If we mass-produce dental cold emails, replies → conversations → customers will follow. The bottleneck is throughput (send volume).” (The premise behind “sales is the only KPI”.)
- Falsifiable prediction
- If the 3–6% B2B cold-email reply benchmark applied to us, 532 sends should yield roughly 16–31 replies. At minimum, a handful.
- Measured result
- 532 real sends → 404 delivered → 0 clicks → 0 replies (bounce ~9.4%, ~4.7× the healthy ceiling; open ~9% vs ~42% average). The probability of 0 replies at a 3% rate is ≈0.00001%, so this is not a sample-size problem: our effective reply rate is <0.3% — under one-tenth of the industry average. Throughput was never the bottleneck; list quality, deliverability and being an unproven new vendor were.
- External anchors
- B2B reply benchmarks Belkins, Instantly; healthcare reply rate The Digital Bloom; healthy bounce ceiling LevelUp Leads.