LinkedIn Outreach Benchmarks for Management Consulting (2026)

Key Takeaways

In management consulting, the average LinkedIn connection acceptance rate is 28.0%. Replies to the connection note average 3.1%, and replies to a message after the connection is accepted average 9.2%. Those numbers come from 1,029,342 connection requests sent by 976 management consulting accounts between May 2025 and April 2026. Against the cross-industry averages of 28.5%, 3.0% and 10.4%, management consulting is above on note replies and below on acceptance and message replies.

Management Consulting vs. the platform average

Metric	Management Consulting	All industries	Difference	Rank
Connection acceptance	28.0%	28.5%	-0.5 pts	20th of 38
Connection-note reply	3.1%	3.0%	+0.1 pts	10th of 38
Message reply after acceptance	9.2%	10.4%	-1.2 pts	28th of 38

Across the 38 industries with at least 50 sending accounts, acceptance runs from 21.8% (telecommunications) to 36.5% (staffing & recruiting). Note replies run from 1.8% to 6.6%, and message replies from 7.2% to 18.9%.

What the numbers say about management consulting outreach

Consultants answer the note and then go quiet. Management consulting ranks 10th of 38 on note replies at 3.1%, above the 3.0% cross-industry average, and 28th on message replies at 9.2%, below the 10.4% average. The 18-place fall between those two rankings is the story of this page.

A note costs the recipient nothing to answer. The message that follows normally asks for a call, and time is the thing consultants sell. Reading it that way, the pattern is less about message quality than about what is being requested and from whom. The data supports the shape of the drop, not that explanation for it.

Acceptance of 28.0% sits half a point under the platform average, so the door itself is unremarkable. This is a 976-account sample, the fourth largest in the dataset, which makes the note-to-message gap one of the better evidenced findings on any of these pages.

If your numbers sit below these

The dataset says where an account sits, not why. From what we see in campaigns, three gaps come up most often in this sector, and they point at different problems.

Note replies under 3.1%. This is the one measure where consulting outperforms, so falling below the sector line means losing the sector’s only structural advantage. Worth checking whether the note is asking a question or making a claim.

Message replies under 9.2%. The sector is already 28th of 38 here, so a number below that is very low in absolute terms. The common cause is a first message that converts a friendly note into a calendar request in one step.

Acceptance under 28.0%. Consulting targets senior people more than most sectors, and senior profiles accept less. A number well below the sector line usually means the seniority of the list has drifted up without the message changing to match.

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Frequently asked questions

What is a good LinkedIn acceptance rate in management consulting?

28.0% is the sector average, just under the 28.5% cross-industry figure. Above 30% is good for this sector. Below 25% usually points at a list skewed to seniority levels that accept less.

Why do consultants reply to notes but not to messages?

Management consulting ranks 10th of 38 on note replies at 3.1% and 28th on message replies at 9.2%, an 18-place drop. The dataset shows the drop clearly across 976 accounts but does not establish why it happens.

How does management consulting compare with other industries?

It is the fourth largest sample in the dataset. Acceptance ranks 20th of 38, note replies 10th, and message replies 28th. End to end about 2.6 in 100 recipients reply to a follow-up, against roughly 3.0 across all industries.

How this data was collected

Management Consulting is reported from 976 accounts and 1,029,342 connection requests sent between May 2025 and April 2026, drawn from the LinkedIn Outreach Benchmarks 2026 dataset of 13.2 million requests across 13,302 accounts. That report carries the full methodology, along with the breakdowns by sender seniority, company size and month that are not repeated here.

Two things to hold in mind while reading any of these figures. The industry is the sender’s, taken from their company profile, not the recipient’s. And only industries with at least 50 sending accounts are reported at all: below that, a single unusual account moves the average by several points, which is why some of the most extreme numbers in the full appendix are not published here.

Related industry benchmarks

• Computer Software, 27.5% acceptance and 8.8% message replies
• Internet, 28.2% acceptance and 10.0% message replies
• Insurance, 28.1% acceptance and 8.8% message replies
• All industry benchmarks

Grade your own outreach against these numbers

Enter your own acceptance and reply rates and grade your outreach against the management consulting benchmark, plus see where you sit among all 38 reported industries. No signup.

Data updated 19 August 2026. Refreshed quarterly against the source report.