The Invisible
Edge

The efficiency gap is not confined to the extremes. When we compare 2024 to 2025 for every firm on the platform, the PE market splits almost exactly in half.

Fifty-one percent of firms saw introduction output per user decline from 2024 to 2025, while 49% maintained or improved. Yes, both groups increased their email activity. The difference was whether that activity converted.

The quarterly trajectory reveals that the declined group actually started from a position of strength. In Q1 2024, they were generating more than double the introductions per user of the maintained group. By Q1 2025, the lines crossed. By Q1 2026, the maintained group was producing twice as many introductions, and the declined group had lost 63% of its original output. The firms now on the wrong side were the higher performers two years ago.

The maintained group’s pattern tells the more important story. Their email volume and introduction output both jumped sharply in Q1 2025 and held at the higher level. The pattern suggests an operational shift in tooling, process, or team structure that produced results almost immediately. The declined group shows no equivalent inflection point, only steady erosion.

The data can’t tell us everything about why some firms convert outreach more efficiently than others. After all, behavioral patterns don’t reveal strategy. But several consistent signals do emerge.

They scale volume deliberately, not reactively

The top quartile’s most distinctive pattern is the trajectory of their email volume: a steady, controlled ramp from 2.7 emails per user in Q1 2024 to 32.2 by Q1 2026—a 12x increase—while maintaining introduction output between 1.0 and 1.4 per user throughout. They built to high volume, testing conversion at each level before scaling further. The bottom quartile started at high volume and never had conversion to protect.

They generate more introductions with less outreach

Top-quartile firms produce 2.5 times more introductions per person while sending one-fifth the email. The implication is that their outreach is more targeted. They’re reaching contacts who are more likely to lead to an introduction, rather than blanketing a large contact base with untargeted volume. 

They stay active when others pull back

The maintained group from Chapter 4 doesn’t show the seasonal engagement dips visible in the declined group’s behavior. Their introduction pipeline is a continuous output, not a cyclical one that restarts every quarter. When deal activity rebounds, their relationships are warm. The other half of the market is restarting cold.

It’s not about firm size

Average team size across all four efficiency quartiles ranges from six to nine seats. We tested whether efficiency varies by firm size directly, grouping firms by team size (1-5, 6-15, 16-50, 51+ seats). Outreach conversion efficiency was nearly identical across every size tier. The 17x gap is not a function of how big a firm is, but rather a function of how that firm operates.

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The behavioral differences this report identifies exist whether or not firms are measuring them. The firms in the top quartile and the firms on the right side of the 51/49 split may not be fully aware of what they’re doing differently. They’ve built systems or habits or cultures that produce these outcomes as a byproduct, not necessarily as a deliberate strategy.

The firms on the wrong side of these gaps are almost certainly not aware of the cost. The industry has measured relationship health by outreach volume for years, but this data suggests that’s been measuring the wrong thing. Whether introduction output is keeping pace with outreach activity is a question most firms haven’t had the infrastructure to answer. That’s starting to change.

The edge is invisible precisely because the behaviors that create it don’t look extraordinary. They look like consistency. They look like having the infrastructure to know which of your contacts actually lead to introductions and which are dead weight in a database. They look like a system that makes the right follow-up the default, not the exception.

That’s the finding. What firms do with it is their own.