Company overview
Private equity is where cold outbound goes to be ignored. The people Pathlit needed — partners and operating leaders at Chicago PE firms — are pitched constantly, by vendors with bigger names, and a connection request that smells of automation is declined before it is read.
Pathlit's product deserved the meeting. Generative-AI workflows land differently when a partner sees them against their own portfolio's operations — but that demo only happens if the invite gets accepted and the first message earns an answer.
So the campaign was small, specific and fast: one city, one buyer type, six days of sending.
Two of every five invites were accepted, and two of every five prospects messaged wrote back.
Results
- Connection acceptance with PE decision-makers
- 41.4% · 63 of 152 invites
- Reply rate on prospects messaged
- 38.5% · 20 of 52 · all replies
- Qualified calls booked
- 10 · first two weeks of sending
- Connection requests sent
- 152 · in six days
Company
- Industry
- Generative AI workflows
- Website
- pathlit.ai
- Engagement
- LinkedIn outbound
- Audience
- Chicago private equity
- Window
- April 2025
Challenge
The base rates are the problem. Cold vendor invites into finance run acceptance rates low enough that most campaigns never get to send their second message — the list is exhausted before the sequence matters.
And the audience punishes volume. A PE partner's inbox is a stream of near-identical AI pitches; anything generic does not merely fail, it marks the sender. For a young company selling into a tight, talkative market, a burned first impression is close to permanent.
Pathlit needed the opposite of a blast: a list narrow enough to personalise honestly, and messaging written around the buyer's actual pain rather than the product's feature list.
Solution
The list came first: Chicago private-equity firms, decision-makers only — 152 people, not fifteen hundred. Small enough that every invite could read like it was written for the person receiving it, because it effectively was.
The sequences were rewritten around pain-point hooks and personalised at scale — the opener earning the acceptance, the follow-up earning the reply, nothing asking for a meeting before the conversation had one to offer.
The whole run was measured in HeyReach from the first send, which is why every number on this page comes off the campaign dashboard rather than memory: sent, accepted, messaged, replied, day by day.
View as table
| Stage | Prospects |
|---|---|
| Connection requests sent | 152 |
| Connections accepted | 63 |
| Messages sent | 52 |
| Replies received | 20 |
Totals from the HeyReach campaign dashboard, 11–16 Apr 2025 — the same artefact reproduced in our client scope reports. Replies are HeyReach's all-replies count, not positive replies only.
Results
The six-day window: 152 connection requests, 63 accepted — 41.4%, in an audience where cold vendor invites routinely run far below half that. Of the 52 prospects messaged after accepting, 20 replied: 38.5%, counting every reply rather than only the positive ones, which is the basis HeyReach reports and the one this page quotes.
Ten qualified calls were booked in the first two weeks of sending — the number the engagement was actually for.
The campaign has had a second life since: it is the benchmark artefact in the scope documents we show prospective outbound clients, where we plan new campaigns against half its acceptance rate. We would rather be graded against a number we beat than one we have to explain.
- 63 connections from 152 invites — a 41.4% acceptance rate with PE decision-makers
- 20 replies from 52 prospects messaged — 38.5%, all replies counted
- 10 qualified calls booked in the first two weeks of sending
- Six days of sending, measured in HeyReach from the first invite
152 invites into Chicago private equity, 63 accepted at 41.4%, 20 replies from 52 messaged at 38.5% — and 10 qualified calls booked in the first two weeks of sending.
Looking ahead
This campaign now does double duty: it filled Pathlit's calendar, and it sets the bar for every outbound engagement we scope — new clients are planned at roughly half its acceptance rate, so the target is a number this page has already beaten on a real audience.
Results
- Connection acceptance with PE decision-makers
- 41.4% · 63 of 152 invites
- Reply rate on prospects messaged
- 38.5% · 20 of 52 · all replies
- Qualified calls booked
- 10 · first two weeks of sending
- Connection requests sent
- 152 · in six days
Company
- Industry
- Generative AI workflows
- Website
- pathlit.ai
- Engagement
- LinkedIn outbound
- Audience
- Chicago private equity
- Window
- April 2025