What works in B2B outbound, straight from live accounts. No recycled best practices.
A high reply rate can hide a dead campaign. One account posted its best-ever raw reply rate and, once the replies were actually read, its lowest real interest, at the same time. The fix is not speed, it is classifying replies before trusting the number.
People scroll on LinkedIn. A 130-word DM ran for days with zero conversions, the proven winners sit at about 70 words. The cap is not a style preference, it is a conversion rule.
Before you blame the message, check the infrastructure, inbox placement, domain health, rendering. Three separate campaigns this year looked like copy problems and were not.
Generic openers do not fail because they are rude. They fail because they are invisible, the reader has seen the exact same sentence a hundred times and their eyes skip it before the real message even starts.