Best Outreach Channel by Role for B2B Sales Teams

Picking between email, LinkedIn, and mobile calls comes down to which one best fits the person you’re actually trying to reach. This post breaks it all down into a simple framework you can plug into your CRM so each contact’s role and channel coverage influence the way you reach out.

TL;DR

• The idea of a best outreach channel comes down to two things: how many verified ways you can reach someone, and the role of that person.

• Channel Coverage Score, or CCS, tells you how many channels you have into each contact across email, LinkedIn, and mobile.

• Channel Fit by Role is a simple framework that shows which channel to use first for founders, CMOs, sales leaders, IT, ops, and HR.

• The examples in this post use public benchmarks and simple models that you can swap out later for your own campaign data.

Why the Best Outreach Channel Depends On Role and Channel Coverage

Cold email is still the default channel for most B2B outbound, with recent studies putting the average cold email response rate around 5.1% and open rates around 27.7% in 2024. Other 2025 benchmarks suggest that most response rates fall between 3 and 5 percent, and the teams that go above that level usually do so when their targeting and hooks are especially strong.

LinkedIn and InMail are slightly different, with several analyses showing that InMail response rates typically fall in the 18 to 25 percent range. More detailed 2025 benchmarks paint a more conservative picture for everyday users, with typical InMail reply rates landing around 3 to 8 percent and 10 to 15 percent range when the outreach is highly targeted. LinkedIn’s own talent research shows that some roles, such as quality assurance, respond to InMail at rates about 16% higher than the global average, which shows that job function can have a real impact on how well the channel performs.

Cold calling has been improving again. Cognism’s 2024 report found that the average conversion from call to meeting was about 4.82%. Other studies place overall success rates for 2024 in a similar 4 to 5 percent range for B2B teams, especially when calls are well targeted and reps are well prepared.

So we know three things. Email is still the backbone of B2B, LinkedIn often wins on engagement when the targeting is right, and phone calling still gets meetings when used appropriately. We also know that some roles naturally spend more time in certain channels than others. Here’s how we turn all of this into something you can actually use inside your CRM.

Step 1: Channel Coverage Score (CCS) for B2B Outreach

Channel Coverage Score gives you a quick way to see how many dependable paths you have into a contact. For each person you check three things: Is the email verified and unlikely to bounce, is the LinkedIn profile confirmed, and is the mobile number accurate and appropriate for B2B calling.

You then give each contact a score from zero to three. A score of 0 means you do not have a dependable channel. A score of 1 means you have only one verified way to reach them, usually email. A score of 2 means you have two dependable paths, such as email and LinkedIn or email and mobile. A score of 3 means you have a verified email, a confirmed LinkedIn profile, and an accurate mobile number.

The reason this matters is that every verified channel gives you another chance to receive a response without putting too much pressure on any one path. In 2025, the average B2B cold email bounce rate is about 7.5%, which means roughly seven or eight out of every hundred emails never even reach the inbox. Our bounce cost calculator also shows how even small increases in bounce rate can quickly raise the cost per meeting. If you only have the contact’s email and that path fails, your chance of reaching them is essentially gone. If you have all three working channels, you can spread a few well-timed attempts across each one instead of wearing out a single inbox.

Step 2: Channel Fit by Role

Once you know how many channels you have, you still need to decide where to begin. Here’s how to do it:

Start by grouping your titles into a few clear role buckets such as founders and C-level, marketing leadership, sales and revenue, IT and data, operations and finance, and HR and people leaders. From there, assign a primary, secondary, and tertiary channel for each group.

Best First Outreach Channel by Role

Role group	Primary channel	Secondary channel	Tertiary channel
Founder or C-level	LinkedIn	Email	Mobile
Marketing leaders (CMO)	Email	LinkedIn	Mobile
Sales / revenue leaders	Mobile	Email	LinkedIn
IT / data / security	Email	LinkedIn	Mobile
Operations / finance	Email	LinkedIn	Mobile
HR / people leaders	Email	LinkedIn	Mobile

For founders and CEOs, LinkedIn is usually the strongest first touch because the platform has over 10 million C-level leaders and decision makers, and many of them actively spend time keeping up with industry news and potential partners. The InMail and LinkedIn message benchmarks we covered earlier make it reasonable to treat a well-researched LinkedIn open as more valuable than a generic cold email open for this group. Email becomes the natural second step when you need to share more context or include a calendar link, and a mobile call is something you save for high-fit cases where you already have a bit of context and trust in place.

For CMOs and marketing leaders, emailing is still the core channel. LinkedIn helps reinforce the relationship through profile views, comments, and short follow ups that point back to the email thread. Calls usually work best once you have seen some positive engagement.

For sales and revenue leaders, phone calls carry more weight. Cold calling studies from 2024 show average success rates around 4.82% for booking meetings from calls, with many B2B teams landing close to the 5% mark. These numbers are similar to or better than the average cold email conversion, and the quality of conversations is often higher since sales leaders are used to fast, direct communication. In this role group, a short and respectful mobile call paired with a follow up email or LinkedIn note works well.

For IT, data, security, operations, finance, and HR, the approach is more cautious. These roles care about risk, process, or people experience, and they usually want clear written context before taking a call. Email is the natural first channel because it allows you to explain what you’re doing and why you’re reaching out. LinkedIn can then be used for verification and light engagement. Mobile comes later, if at all, and only after enough trust has been established for a call to feel appropriate.

The framework above is a starting point that you can refine as you measure your own results by role and channel.

Channel Coverage Score Example for the same B2B Segment

To see how CCS and the role framework work together, imagine a segment of 100 sales leaders where your ICP is well defined and every contact is a strong fit.

At CCS 1 you only have verified email addresses to work with. With an average B2B bounce rate of about 7.5%, only around 92 or 93 of those messages will actually reach an inbox. If you apply a mid-range cold email response rate of about 5.1% to the messages that are actually delivered, you can expect about five replies. If about a third of those replies convert to meetings, you end up with roughly 1.5 meetings per 100 contacts.

Now imagine those same 100 contacts at CCS 3. You still open with a targeted email, so you keep the original one and a half meetings from that first channel. You also run a small LinkedIn sequence for non-responders with a conservative 5% reply rate and the same one third conversion to meetings, which adds roughly another 1.5 meetings per 100 contacts. Finally, you add a small number of mobile call attempts, using the 4.82% call to meeting benchmark as an upper limit but assuming a lower effective rate of about 0.5% per dial to keep the estimate conservative.

You will have some overlap, since the same person might have replied on any of the three channels, so you cannot simply add the totals together. Even if you assume that 30% of those extra opportunities would have happened anyway, you still move from roughly 1.5 meetings per 100 contacts at CCS 1 to something closer to 3 meetings per 100 contacts at CCS 3. This is just a rough example, but it shows in plain numbers how broader channel coverage combined with role-aware sequencing can nearly double results without leaning too heavily on any single channel.

How to Implement Channel Coverage Score and Role Based Outreach In Your CRM

You don’t need new software to start using CCS and role fit, you can start with three simple adjustments in your existing CRM or sales engagement tool.

First, assign each contact to a role group. Start with a simple mapping table that links common job title keywords to the six role groups mentioned in the table above, and refine the edge cases as you go.

Second, add three status fields for email, LinkedIn and mobile. Store whether the email is verified, risky, or unknown, whether the LinkedIn profile is confirmed or not found, and whether the mobile number is accurate and appropriate to use. Add a “last checked” date for each field so you can follow a quarterly or 90 day re-verification cadence.

Third, calculate the Channel Coverage Score for each contact. Once you have the CCS and role fields in place, you can build separate sequences for each role group and, if you want, branch those sequences based on CCS. One version of the sequence might be “email only” for CCS 1 contacts in that role, while the CCS 3 version adds LinkedIn and mobile steps spaced out over a few weeks.

The key is to keep total touches per person reasonable and let CCS determine how many channels you use, while the role determines which channel you start in. This structure lets you adjust as benchmarks change and as rules around email authentication and mobile usage evolve, without having to rebuild everything from scratch.

What this means for your data strategy

Channel Coverage Score and Channel Fit by Role give you a structured way to decide how to use email, LinkedIn, and mobile for different decision-makers instead of arguing about which channel is “best” in general. When the underlying contact data is accurate and refreshed, you can test and refine this framework over time based on what your own campaigns actually show.

Emarketnow approaches its own data with the same principle in mind: keep contact records as fresh and precise as possible so frameworks like CCS and role-based channel fit are grounded in reality rather than guesswork.

FAQ

How do I calculate Channel Coverage Score for a B2B contact?

Channel Coverage Score, or CCS, is simply the number of verified and safe ways you can reach one person. Give 1 point for a deliverable email, 1 point for a confirmed LinkedIn profile, and 1 point for an accurate mobile number for B2B outreach. Someone with only email is CCS 1, email plus LinkedIn is CCS 2, and email plus LinkedIn plus mobile is CCS 3.

What if most of my contacts only have email right now?

If most of your contacts are CCS 1 with only email, you can still use the role framework to build better email-first sequences and track how each role group performs. As you enrich more records with LinkedIn profiles and mobile numbers, you can start testing CCS 2 and CCS 3 sequences.