Introduction: The Cold Calling Problem, Why Connect Rates Are Your Greatest Lever & Which Dialer You Use Matters
TitanX has analyzed tens of millions of phone records in every industry you can imagine along with thousands of cold calling campaigns and cadences. The one big statistic that stands out and holds true?
A whopping 70-80% of your market is NOT reachable via phone. It’s not that the phone numbers are poor (although some are), but that, statistically speaking, 70-80% of your prospects will never answer their phone from a cold call.
And the biggest mistake…. Sales teams/reps are treating all prospects the same as if they have an equal shot at all of them.
Multiple headwinds and human behavior are involved in that statistic but we will leave that for another day.
Your SDR/BDRs are spending hours on the phone working their contacts. That list is filled with right person, wrong person, good numbers, bad numbers, people who pick up, and people who don’t.
It’s the needles & haystack analogy. Your lists are the haystack filled with all of the contacts and numbers associated with those contacts. The needles are the people who you COULD ever reach on the phone and get an at bat with for a meeting/conversion.
Reps are essentially professional hay-sifters, today. Going straw by straw to find their prized needles. It’s highly inefficient.
This is the #1 reason why connect rates are so low. It’s a lot of waste, both in time and money to spend the lion share of your time getting voicemails and listening to ring tones.
At TitanX, we take that “haystack” and hand you the “needles.” Instead of treating every contact as a phone prospect, we use a proprietary phone scoring model to separate the high-propensity-to-answer contacts (the needles) from the waste (the hay) in your prospect lists.
And for clarification: "waste" does not mean they are not a prospect. It simply means that they are not a viable phone prospect -- use another channel.
The result? Our users experience 20-30% connect rates on average, compared to the industry average of 3-5%.
But even with better data, you still need a sound dialer to execute on those calls efficiently. It can be the difference in TitanX data getting you 15-20% connect rates and 25-30% connect rates.
Let’s break down 6 well known (and a few less so) dialers.
The Best Sales Dialers for Outbound Teams in 2025
We, at TitanX, have the fortunate position of seeing data from all providers and every possible dialer being used in the market.
We’ll address data providers in another post and focus on dialers here.
Not all dialers are the same. Some prioritize speed and volume, some prioritize deliverability, others focus on sales engagement/task management, and a few leverage AI (which we are not a huge fan of for the phone).
When evaluating a dialer, consider:
- Dialing Type: Power dialing (one-by-one) vs. Parallel dialing (multi-line dialing) – and what the impact of using either can have, both positive and negative.
- Call Deliverability: Are barriers being removed for your reps to actually get as many calls answered (delivered) as possible? Top 3 biggest reasons your connect rates are tanking is due to poor deliverability.
- Call Receptivity: Are there aspects of the dialer that are hurting the conversion of that connect into a positive outcome (talk time, meeting set, etc)?
- Rep Efficiency AND Effectiveness: Are the reps able to make their dials efficiently without compromising effectiveness? NEVER compromise effectiveness for efficiency.
The Dialer Ranking
1. FrontSpin – Best For Quality Dialing & SFDC Integration
It really doesn’t get better than FrontSpin for committed cold calling efforts. Their connect rates are as good as you will get out of the box, their support is incredible, and they are committed to the craft of dialing. Frontspin was originally built for cold calling agencies that are phone heavy, want a tight integration to SFDC, and want their sales reps focused on what really matters. They have given incredible attention to quality dialing.
✅ Pros:
- Direct relationship with phone carriers yielding the highest quality phone numbers which increases deliverability
- Highest connect rates for a dialer we have found (combining with TitanX is an incredibly powerful combination)
- Phone number spam detection and remediation to keep numbers clean through their own 1:1 relationship with carriers
- Seamless SFDC integration
- Zero pause after the connect-to-prospect
- “No fluff” – the tool may not look as clean and modern as Orum or Nooks but it is built for reps to have very few clicks and distractions
- Incredible support
🔻 Cons:
- No current integration with Hubspot (this is under construction currently for a 2025 launch along with a standalone dialer that does not require a CRM)
- Does not overlay/integrate with Outreach or Salesloft where many teams are still managing their sales activity sequences
- A bit on the expensive side (but we believe the value tradeoff is well worth it - we use it internally at TitanX)
2. PhoneBurner – Best For Simplicity, Quality Dialing & Hubspot Integration
A distant second to FrontSpin but still a league above the rest and gaining. Their connect rates are great through their ARMOR product, the simplicity of the tool creates very little distraction for reps, and if you’re on Hubspot it’s your current best option. PhoneBurner has been around for some time and is not a widely used dialer in the Mid-Market and Enterprise B2B space, but it is an incredible dialer.
✅ Pros:
- ARMOR product allows for high quality numbers, spam detection, and number remediation
- Connect rates are above average out of the box (pairs really nicely with TitanX)
- Very simple design built specifically for dialing and user friendliness
- Hubspot/SFDC integration
- Zero pause on connect
🔻 Cons:
- The integrations can be a little clunky with CRMs at first
- Their phone number and ARMOR packages are more expensive than average (absolutely worth the value)
3. Orum – Best For Parallel Dialing
Although we are not a fan of parallel dialing, Orum does have a great tool and the single-line dialer feature can be used very well in tandem with TitanX.
Orum has the lion share of the market for modern parallel dialers (up to 7 lines dialing at once). Most companies are moving to Orum to increase the dial volume for their reps. Though there are use cases where a parallel dialer can create rep efficiency, the downsides ought to be weighed in your consideration. See our post on The Dark Side of Parallel Dialers.
That said, TitanX users who dial out of Orum (using their single-line dial feature) are seeing great results. We will NEVER advise you to use their multi-line parallel dialing feature.
✅ Pros:
- More does not always equal better, but for some use cases, increasing dial volume substantially will create a lift… if connect rates are not drastically impacted.
- They have built their own phone number infrastructure as opposed to buying numbers from low tier number providers like Twilio. This helps with “number hygiene" although it doesn't completely solve for it.
- Voicemail and bad number detection can help clean out lists for follow up calling which can take some leg work away from the sales reps
- You can elect to single-line dial out of Orum instead of power dial with good deliverability (pairs well with TitanX)
🔻 Cons:
- Numbers get marked as spam very quickly with the volume of dialing. The spam detection and remediation process must be sound.
- The “pause” that you experience when a prospect picks up can/will hurt the receptivity of a call and hurt your conversion metrics
- Connect rate will be lower than if you were to power-dial
4. Outreach.io – Best for Enterprise Sales Activity Management
Salesloft’s biggest competitor in the SEP space (founded in 2014). Outreach was the industry poster child in the late 2010’s but has not done well keeping up with phone deliverability practices (or email for that matter). Similar to Salesloft they have made their focus predominantly on the sales activity management side of sales development.
They are still well behind the market in terms of dialing capabilities, but Outreach can be configured in a productive way when using TitanX.
✅ Pros:
- Strong reporting
- Ability to manage multi-channel sequences
- Tight integrations to SFDC
- Slightly better connect rates than other SEPs (Salesloft)
- Integrates with some dialers that enable you to manage call tasks out of Outreach but make calls from other dialers that may perform better
🔻 Cons:
- Number rotation is not strong which leads to numbers being marked as spam
- No spam detection and number remediation leading to high spam rate and low connect rates
- Very distracting for reps - they tend to lose productivity “clicking around”
- No clear roadmap
5. Nooks – Best for Gamified Team Features
We are just not a fan from a dialer perspective. We know they have a lot of hype, but that doesn't change the facts. The habits that their tool, marketing, and sales practices push on sales reps, we believe, to be a negative impact on the SDR/BDR market and the connect rates are just nowhere near where they should be.
Nooks began as a virtual sales floor software (not a dialer). Teams could make their cold calls using other dialers together in a virtual (Zoom-like) setting within Nooks. In time, they added a parallel dialer feature to their sales collaboration features. The dialer has potential, but currently it has a difficult time competing from a call deliverability and call receptivity perspective.
✅ Pros:
- Their sales collaboration (virtual sales floor and sales coaching) features are actually quite cool and useful for helping reps get better coaching and competition (but if that is all you care about, just use CallBlitz)
- They have raised a lot of money which gives us hope that they will begin giving solid attention to their dial quality — but “hope” is all we have at the moment
- You can single-line dial out of their tool, but they continuously push people to their parallel dialing feature (which we do not recommend).
- Gamification features to attract younger talent
🔻 Cons:
- Connect rates are lower than other parallel dialers (Orum) and substantially lower than a sound power-dialer.
- The “pause” that you experience when a prospect picks up will hurt the receptivity of a call and hurt your conversion metrics
- They have poor quality phone number management which leads to poor connect rates and spammed numbers
- Their founding team has very little to no sales backgrounds and it shows in their understanding of what teams using the phone actually need
6. Salesloft – Best for Structured Cadences
One of the longest standing Sales Engagement Platforms (SEP) in the market (Founded in 2011) they have a strong foothold on the “sequencer” market. Though teams are still using it for dialing, Salesloft is predominantly used for prospect/sales activity management and sequencing which tends to be predominantly used for emailing and reporting.
They are really far behind. If you are going to use Salesloft to manage sequences that is fine. But we believe you have to attach a different dialer to be as effective as possible on the phones.
✅ Pros:
- Very tight relationships and integrations with data providers like ZoomInfo and CRMs like SFDC and Hubspot
- Ability to manage multi-channel sequences
- Transparency and coaching features to manage sales reps
- Integrates with some dialers that enable you to manage call tasks out of Salesloft but make calls from other dialers that may perform better
🔻 Cons:
- Number rotation is not strong which leads to numbers being marked as spam
- No spam detection and number remediation leading to high spam rate and low connect rates
- Very distracting for reps - they tend to lose productivity “clicking around”
- No clear roadmap to improve this
Conclusion: The Winning Formula for Higher Connect Rates & Sales Efficiency
TitanX + The Right Dialer = 5-8x Higher Connect Rates.
Want to increase your connect rate from 3-5% to 20-30%?
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