Outbound is plagued by confusion

Sales is the art of clarity.

No one buys what they do not understand. I don't know how a car engine works, but I know it'll get me where I need to go. That’s what I understood, so that’s what I bought.

SaaS buyers are just confused. (Services too, I’d argue).

Brent Adamson, the Challenger guy, has been making this case in HBR for years. The diagnosis is simple: buyers are drowning in information and starving for sense.

They've sat through ten demos, read forty blog posts, watched eight webinars, and they're more confused than when they started. Adamson calls the seller's #1 job sensemaking. Helping the buyer figure out what they actually need.

Gartner recently reported: B2B buyers now spend only 17% of their purchase process talking to potential suppliers. 83% of the decision is happening without you in the room. Which means 83% of the confusion is also happening without you in the room. Compounding. Unresolved.

It's not the buyer's fault.

They're burned on tools they never fully implemented: 80% of SaaS features go rarely or never used, per Pendo. Over half of paid licenses sit unused, per Zylo. They're burned on consulting engagements that didn't cut it. They don't want to add another tool to their tech pile (and let's be honest: most "tech stacks" are tech piles).

They're confused. The most expensive emotion in B2B sales.

Confusion produces no decision more often than a wrong decision.

The cure isn't more content. It's earlier conversations.

That 17% stat from Adamson isn’t a law of physics. It’s a symptom. Get in front of your market faster: call them. Shape the conversation. Set the table.

Instead, most GTM orgs are spending more than ever (time+money) on pre-conversation infrastructure. Enrichment, signals, intent data, AI personalization, sequencers, attribution, content engines. All of it is designed to delay or replace the moment a human talks to a human.

It's the wrong bet.

And the buyers know. They're turning to AI to try to cut through the marketing-speak. The problem is, websites and blogs and Reddit are also marketing-speak. Or in Reddit's case, straight-up lies. AI inherits the confusion. It doesn't fix it.

Every step a buyer takes without a conversation is a step they take in confusion. By the time they reach your demo, they've made a dozen quiet assumptions about your product, your category, your fit. Most of them wrong. And now you have three calls to undo what one conversation could have prevented.

Earlier conversations aren't extra work. They're the prevention of extra work.

We see this most clearly in our go-live sessions. The moment customers dial their first TitanX-scored list:

• "That was crazy to just reach somebody immediately. I don't want to give you guys too much in the way of props here. But this is pretty impressive. This is proof of concept for sure."
• "Three connects on seven calls. Yesterday I did like 60 calls and I had two connects."
• "I'll take one to six over one to 60. I think that's pretty simple math. If that's what you can do for me, it's going to be raining meetings over here, brother."
• "I have had more conversations in this little block than I've had all week."
• "I've led XDR teams for the better part of over a decade. At this point, it is odd and new to place a call and just feel very confident that person is going to answer the phone. That's new, but it's exciting."
• "What the hell is this? Five conversations on eight calls."
• "You're literally saving lives of salespeople across the country if this shit works."
• "I love this so much because this is definitely leaning into my personal psychology of sales."
• "This is what I've been waiting for, fellas. Where have you been? Where have you been?"

Conversations uncover what AI cannot

What those quotes above are really about is a new realm of possibility for sales teams: converse more, learn more, win more.

The sooner you talk live - human to human - with a buyer, the sooner you can understand them, and they can understand you. “We’re a best fit for…” is a lovely sentence. “What are you really looking for?” is an excellent question.

The information you can only get from talking to a human, that no AI corpus can manufacture:

• Real PMF, not paper PMF. Buyers tell you the official problem on the website. They tell you the real problem in a conversation, the one their leader is privately worried about, the one their board asked about last week, the one nobody has phrased yet.
• Org reality vs. org chart. Who actually decides. Who'll torpedo it quietly. Who's about to leave. Which VP just got their budget cut. The buying committee on LinkedIn is fiction. The one you learn about from a conversation is real.
• Failed rollouts you'd never have found. "We tried something like this two years ago and it didn't take." Now you know exactly what your demo has to address. Without the conversation, you'd be selling against an invisible competitor named last year's disappointment.
• Black swans. The thing the buyer mentions in passing that becomes the whole deal. The acquisition rumor. The compliance deadline. The internal champion you didn't know existed. The product gap a competitor has that you didn't realize was a wedge. None of this is in any enrichment tool. All of it is one conversation away.

The buyers who buy from you fastest are the ones who feel understood fastest. And the only way to be understood is to be talked to.

Conversations. Per. Day.

If you take one number out of this newsletter, take this: conversations per rep per day.

Not dials. Not connects. Not meetings booked. Conversations.

Not leads. Not downloads. Not registrants. Not attendees. Not signals. Conversations.

Real ones. With a human who works at a company you'd sell to, who has knowledge of your buyer, or is a possible buyer.

That number is the single best leading indicator of pipeline I've ever found. It beats every signal, every intent score, every AI-generated lead grade. Because it measures the only thing that actually cures confusion for the buyer and the rep.

We had our TitanX onsite this week.

(hence the late Friday newsletter)

So many great conversations. So much we’re building that I wish I could share.

And we will. But for now, one story that I’m thinking about - Patrick (our MDR whose job is to have conversations with prospects across the customer lifecycle, whether intercepting inbound, intel gathering on target accounts, or reviving closed lost deals) asked me:
“Have you always loved conversations as a marketer?”

No. It wasn’t until I had to prove to an arrogant CEO that he did not have product-market fit in the US. I was right. And still managed to find a tiny sliver of accounts where one rep booked 5 meetings a day.

I realized then that high quality data (used TitanX to pull it off) + a relentless focus on ICP conversation volume was an unstoppable force.

Most reps today have one, maybe two conversations a day. If they're lucky.

We think they should have ten.

(Or even 2 conversations in 20 minutes).

In the end, you cannot understand your buyers well enough to speak their language unless you speak to them. That’s how language works.

Therefore: optimize conversations per day.

That's the bet. That's the cure. That's the work.

Thanks for reading.

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

P.S. If you want a “Cold Call” hat… trade you a demo.