Best Outreach Channels for IT Service Providers: LinkedIn, Email, or Phone in 2025?

Channel selection is often the longest deciding factor for IT sales leaders and can even have a bigger impact on lost pipeline than poor messaging.

On this page

• Why IT service providers get channel selection wrong
• What the 2025 data says about LinkedIn outreach for IT services
• Cold email response rates for IT services buyers in 2025
• Where phone fits in an IT services outreach strategy today
• How to allocate outreach effort across channels as an IT sales leader
• How LemonLime handles channel selection for IT service providers
• FAQ

Why IT service providers get channel selection wrong

Most IT sales teams are working hard at sales across various channels. The problem is that most of them have no clue which of these channels their buyers are using.

A managed services provider targeting mid-market legal firms will face a unique channel environment to that of a SaaS startup provider. The biggest mistake here is to treat them as if they weren’t different.

Second, falling back on the sales channel that a salesperson is most comfortable with as opposed to what the data suggests. Phone-centric teams never use LinkedIn and email-centric teams never pick up the phone. That’s not a strategy.

Third, decisions with respect to individual sales channels are usually taken once a year and then ‘forgotten’. In 2024, however, the buyer behavior changed in a significant way, as the numbers below show.

What the 2025 data says about LinkedIn outreach for IT services

The idea of using LinkedIn for IT services sales is not new. What has changed is the evidence.

A 2025 survey of 62 global IT service providers by Techreviewer found that 61.3% of IT services companies use LinkedIn as a primary channel, making it the third most widely used channel in the category. 35.5% of respondents chose the online press release as the most effective channel of all, out of all channels measured.

Not everyone is enamored with LinkedIn, however. 19.4% of the same group of users reported feelings of disappointment with the platform. The gap between "most effective" and "disappointing" existing in the same dataset tells you something real: LinkedIn works when the targeting and messaging fit the buyer, and fails when they do not.

A study on LinkedIn response rates also provided results on reply rates for different industries. The highest response rate for legal and professional services was 10.42% whereas Software and SaaS had the lowest reply rate of 4.77%.

For an IT services company targeting buyers in legal, compliance, financial services and professional services sectors, LinkedIn would typically be the first port of call. For a company targeting SaaS startups and their technical co-founders, however, the response environment would be materially worse, so the channel mix would need to move in this direction too.

Cold email response rates for IT services buyers in 2025

Cold email is not dead, it’s just working at a much lower conversion rate than most people think when building out pipeline models for cold email.

The Belkins 2025 study puts the average cold email reply rate at 0.45%. That number deserves to sit alone for a moment.

There are less than one reply per 100 cold emails at 0.45% open rates sent out by an IT sales rep. Even at higher volumes such as 200 sends per week, the deliverability risk means that most small to mid-sized IT firms cannot be sending at this volume in order to rely on cold email for their primary prospecting efforts without appropriate list quality and deliverability in place.

Cold email has a place in your outreach mix for IT services, after you’ve used LinkedIn. If the person you’re sending to has engaged with your LinkedIn messages, or matches a buying signal you’re using, the open rate and response rate to subsequent follow-up email will be dramatically different than a cold name that has never seen your name before.

The channel of email is volume as opposed to high quality. It is primarily a channel of scale and asynchronous communication. Use email as a volume layer to extend your reach down from the intent established on LinkedIn with high quality communication as required for the high value accounts on LinkedIn.

Where phone fits in an IT services outreach strategy today

Cold calling generates the most internal debate and has the least reliable data for benchmarking.

Phone can be a last touch point for IT services, framing a call is hard work but does have value. Decision-makers at the buyer types IT firms typically target—operations leaders, IT directors, finance leads at mid-market companies—are harder to reach by cold call than they were five years ago. Increasing use of gatekeepers, screening apps and voicemail drop has lowered the connect rate.

In fact, phone does have value when used at the right time in the buying process (e.g. after first contact via LinkedIn message or email to conversion rate for phone calls that are set up as a result of the above mentioned channels compared to cold dialing to IT services accounts). Here, the phone serves as a conversion catalyst and not as a medium for prospecting new accounts.

For teams that have a strong referral network or are reactivating dormant accounts, phone to a booked meeting is typically the fastest channel to set such a meeting. Note however that this is a very different job from cold prospecting and thus should be sized and staffed accordingly.

How to allocate outreach effort across channels as an IT services sales leader

The framework for a practical starting point for most IT services firms is outlined below based on the evidence presented.

LinkedIn first, for high-value targets. For professional services, legal, finance and operations leadership buyers within your customer profile, devote the lion’s share of your team’s efforts on that channel. That 35.5% of IT firms rating most effective on LinkedIn are not anomalies.

Email as a sequence layer, not a cold opener. Use email in follow-up sequences after conversation on LinkedIn, and re-engage warm leads and contacts through targeted email sequences. The average reply rate of email of 0.45% should cease to be considered a primary metric to measure volume of new prospects.

Use your phone for conversion, not cold prospecting. Use your phone calls to talk with people who have shown some intent online (e.g. they replied to an email, clicked on a link, were referred by a past customer). Dialing cold lists of phone numbers in 2025 will be a very high effort / very low return activity for most IT services companies unless your average deal size is so large that you’re building out a full inside sales team.

The mix of your buyers is more meaningful than the mix of your channels. In Techreviewer’s data, companies selling to different types of buyers achieve entirely different results via the same channels. Take a look at the distribution of the first conversations for your top 20 closed deals over the last 12 months – that’ll be way more reliable than any industry benchmark.

While channel allocation decisions are not to be treated as fixed for all time, you should test any major shift in channel mix on your #1 buyer segment for 90 days before ramping up the entire team to support said channels.

How LemonLime handles channel selection for IT service providers

The channel decision is worth nothing without the right prospects and adequate messaging prepared. That’s where most IT sales teams fail to increase their sales – not due to lack of strategy, but due to lack of execution time.

LemonLime continuously studies the business, its industry, its competitors, and relevant content, then uses over 50 lead sources, targeting methods, and buying signals to identify high-potential prospects. Job boards, LinkedIn activity, company sites, funding news, tech stack signals, review boards, and forums are all part of how it evaluates where to find buyers.

Once a prospect is identified, LemonLime prepares personalized outreach and selects the appropriate channel for that specific opportunity—LinkedIn, email, or others depending on what fits the buyer. The sales leader reviews and approves the work before anything reaches a prospect. Nothing is sent without that approval.

Every morning at 9:00 AM local time, LemonLime delivers a relevance-filtered set of work for that day. Some days that includes new prospect outreach. Other days it surfaces up content opportunities, potential partnership opportunities or growth indicators that you should act upon. It is filtered through the current needs of the business, not a daily fixed bundle.

That’s it. You need to provide a business name, a website and choose what you think is most important. No internal-data connection is required to get started.

For an IT sales head managing a team's pipeline, LemonLime functions as the research and preparation layer—finding the right prospects, choosing the right channel, and preparing the right message—so the team's time goes into conversations rather than list building.

LemonLime is $999 per month for one company, self-serve, with no minimum contract and a 100% money-back guarantee for any new customer who does not see clear value.