Sales people and leadership pick up the phone the most. In the 1,000,000 French B2B cold calls we analyzed with Quentin Despas (Katana), both functions connect above 15%, against an 11.3% average and a range of 11% to 20% depending on persona and time slot. Who you call changes your connect rate more than how you call.

Connect rate by function: the benchmark

Here is what the benchmark says about who answers an unknown number.

• Sales and sales leadership: above 15%. They live on the phone, their mobile is their office, and an unknown number might be a customer.
• Founders and CEOs: strong around 10am, before the day fills up. They answer because nobody filters their calls and because curiosity is part of the job.
• Marketing: hard to reach most of the day, best around 4pm.
• HR: best around 1pm, when they are at their desk and the rest of the company is at lunch. HR also receives a lot of calls from candidates, so an unknown number is normal.

In our experience finance and IT sit at the lower end of the range. They are not hostile; they simply get fewer legitimate calls from strangers and treat an unknown number as noise.

Across all personas and all slots: 11.3%. Full detail in What is the real cold call connect rate in B2B sales.

Seniority: the myth that executives do not answer

Most SDR playbooks say to start with managers because executives are unreachable. Our data says the opposite. Leadership connects above 15%, founders peak at 10am, and both sit well above the 11.3% average.

Three reasons. Senior people in European companies under a few hundred employees rarely have an assistant filtering a mobile. They decide quickly whether a call is worth 30 seconds, so they pick up to find out. And they get fewer cold calls than their managers, because most reps are told not to call them.

The gap is in what happens after the pickup. An executive gives you 20 seconds to prove relevance, a manager gives you a minute. That is a script problem, not a reachability problem.

Mobile numbers beat switchboards for every persona

The number type decides more than the title. A direct mobile rings in the prospect's pocket. A landline rings on the switchboard, and in France the "standard" is a professional gatekeeper who has heard every opener.

In our experience, the personas that look unreachable in a CRM are often the personas whose numbers are landlines. Marketing and finance contacts are rarely listed with mobiles; sales contacts always are. Before concluding that a persona does not answer, check what share of your numbers for that persona are mobiles.

That is also why list quality is the first thing we look at with a team whose connect rate is under 10%. Fixing numbers is faster than fixing people.

Picking up is not booking

Connect rate tells you who answers. It does not tell you who books. The two rankings do not match.

In our benchmark, 65% of reps open by explaining what they sell. Those pitch-first openers reach a 2-3% meeting rate. Openers built on a trigger, something that just happened at the prospect's company, reach 7-10%. The persona you reach matters less than the first sentence you say to them.

In our experience, HR picks up often and books rarely unless the trigger is a hiring plan. Sales leaders pick up often and book often, because they recognise a good call when they hear one. Founders book when the call is about their numbers, not your product. Build a different first sentence for each persona, not just a different time slot.

Benchmark yourself against your persona mix, not the market

A team selling to CFOs and a team selling to sales leaders will never have the same connect rate, and neither should be judged against 11.3%. Do this instead.

1. Export your last month of dials with persona and outcome.
2. Compute connect rate and meeting rate per persona. Ignore any persona with fewer than 100 dials.
3. Compare each persona with its slot: are you calling founders at 10am and marketing at 4pm, or everyone at 9am?
4. Check the share of mobile numbers per persona.
5. Then compare with the benchmark range of 11% to 20%, persona by persona.

Most "low connect rate" problems turn out to be a number problem or a timing problem for one or two personas, not a team problem.

How Sonik approaches persona targeting

We built Sonik around the idea that connect rate is an input. The dialer lets reps build calling sessions by persona and run them in parallel in the slot where that persona answers, so a session of founders happens at 10am and a session of marketing leads at 4pm.

Signals from the CRM add a second layer. A sales leader who just started a new job, a marketing director whose company just visited your pricing page: those contacts go to the top of the session, because the trigger gives the rep an opener that books at 7-10% instead of 2-3%.

The team's own connect rate by persona is visible in reporting, so the benchmark is a starting point, not a verdict.

Conclusion

Sales and leadership answer the most, above 15%; founders answer at 10am, HR at 1pm, marketing at 4pm; and the average across French B2B is 11.3%. Who you call and when you call them explain most of the gap between a 9% team and a 16% team. This week, split your connect rate by persona and check the share of mobile numbers for the persona that looks worst. That is usually where the easy win is.