We’ve been comparing cold outreach effectiveness between tech startups and manufacturing companies to understand why outbound strategies that work for one, completely fail for the other. Throxy books meetings for B2B companies selling into legacy industries, so it’s crucial we're all over this to help us maintain our edge.
We ran a structured dataset:
100 YC tech startups (2,998 total population)
100 UK manufacturing firms (142k total population)
And analyzed the digital footprint of roughly 200 founders and directors.
The early results show why most outbound tools break outside tech (appreciating it is a small data set, which we are building out).
Summary of our findings
100% of tech founders have LinkedIn profiles. Only 51% of manufacturing directors do.
45% of manufacturers don’t have a website.
66% of those who do have a website have a company LinkedIn page.
If you’re relying on LinkedIn, Apollo, or Crunchbase data, you’re missing up to 79% of your manufacturing TAM.
The gap between tech and manufacturing
Tech is digital first and founders live online. Their data is structured and their companies are verified.
Manufacturing is physical. Companies are often registered under holding entities or outdated trading names, and sometimes don’t exist online at all. We had to build hybrid workflows, including Google search, AI agents and manual verification, just to match company directors to real profiles.
2. What this means for outbound
Outbound automation that depends on web data collapses when there’s no web presence (fairly self-explanatory). In manufacturing, 98% of your prospects will never post on LinkedIn and many won’t even appear in your CRM import. This means that for most tools, you are missing high quality business leads.
3. What we’re doing about it
We’re building AI systems to map “offline networks.” These identify plant-level decision makers, verifying contact data through multiple layers, by scraping directories, supplier databases, conferences, website ‘about’ sections, and contact sections. Our agents can autonomously find domains and contact information, enriching it into usable outbound datasets.
This is a big step forward for companies selling into traditional industries, unlocking conversations with accounts most teams ignore or miss because “the data isn’t there.”
If you’re selling into manufacturing, logistics, or construction, we’d love to compare notes.
The full dataset and methodology is available to view HERE.
