95% of LI outreach over one paragraph is **perceived** as spam. Think about that before sending. 99% for first outreach that includes a calendar link. Now called a “pitch slap.”

Pitch slap formula:

Intro/Who they are
What they do
Who they helped “companies like yours” but rarely true
Calendar link

After my supposition, I went and researched and found this article. My hunch is off by 0.12%   (luck?)

https://blog.engagekit.io/linkedin-response-benchmarks-2025/

from Claude  (I do the writing,  Claude provides commentary)

The response rate math tells the whole story. The average LinkedIn DM reply rate across all outreach types is 10.3%. That means roughly 90% of messages get no reply at all. For InMail specifically, the average lands around 6.38%, and sales/marketing professionals see reply rates of only 6.32-6.40% because they recognize every tactic in the book. Single-action direct messages, the ones designed to prompt one specific action (like booking a call), have just a 4.88% reply rate.