Here is what it should look like to prospect at the top of the funnel.

• “I love this. I've already gotten more connects in the last 10 minutes than I have all month. So that's fantastic.”
• “This is good. This is already more conversation than I usually have in a week. Yeah like the connect rate is through the roof.”
• “I've had more connects this morning in the last 15-20 minutes than I usually do on a good day.”

These are direct quotes from TitanX Go-Live sessions, where customers dial their first TitanX scored list in a pilot.

Reps are starved for conversations. So when they have a handful in a few minutes, they are ecstatic.

Instead, typically we hear that most days “I'm just speeding through and knowing that I'm gonna get an answer.”

“I'm not going back. Don't make me go back.”

The phone never totally stopped working.

We just left it for dead, chased after automation and now AI, and then wondered why our outbound efforts dried up, lacked a consistent feedback loop, and felt soulless.

In 2015, Jeb Blount wrote:

❝

The phone is your most powerful sales tool. Period, end of story.

But even then, Jeb lamented that most sales people were never taught how to use the phone.

The phone never stopped working. The lists feeding it atrophied.

JB Daguené covers this in depth in a recent piece on “List Building Before AI” - “nine out of ten pipeline failures trace back to list quality, not outreach, timing, spam, or activity.”

We see this all the time. Very few sales orgs can repeatedly produce great lists with any consistency.

JB’s general framework for pipe gen failure modes maps neatly to ours: list quality, outreach, timing, spam, activity (we usually break it down: List, Message, Rep, Follow-up). The biggest trap is the list: teams spend months tuning the copy on a list that was never fixable, because list quality lives upstream of everything and gets diagnosed last.

We got all the data, but it wasn’t that… good

Data vendors became cheap. You’ve heard us beat this drum before (“revops is still the upper limit of your outbound”).

Cheap data caused a spiraling set of behaviors, culminating in multi-line dialing (parallel dialing) becoming normalized for many. (I get tired of defenses of parallel dialing: “They have their place”. They only have their place in a universe plagued by poor data quality. Fix the first constraint first.)

After all, if the numbers you’re calling are poor quality, and you respond by “calling more” - you’ve just turned an accuracy problem into a spam problem.

And with all the concordant rise of sales tech, we haven’t seen the payoff.

I’ve worked in sales tech a few times. Before Joey reached out to me last summer, I had written off the category altogether.

I had watched way too many founders crash and burn selling into the “most important mess” in software. Even without AI, the space was too crowded, the tendency toward VC-backed nepotism too strong, the failure rates too high.

TitanX is different because it gives you back the ability to speak to humans at a sufficient rate to succeed.

The primary reason I joined TitanX was deeply philosophical. Take, for example, this quote from one of our go-live calls:

"I actually liked talking to people back to back because it felt more human. That part of my brain was really engaged."

You can reach consistent pipe gen:

1. Design your list building process like a machine. I’ll point you to JB’s guide, which is an excellent fit for ABM teams.
2. Call only the people who answer their phones. (You know where to find us).
3. The rest is all about how you iterate and follow up. Tune the message (you’re having enough conversations). Train the rep (objection handling, tone, domain knowledge). Nurture the relationship (email, social, marketing - the rest of GTM fits in neatly here).

Together, these things combine into that magic moment when it all clicks, when it all makes sense. When pipe gen doesn’t feel like an impossible boulder to lift.

I’ll leave you with this quote from one of our go-live sessions:

❝

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.

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

P.S. Where do you fall on the simplify-versus-tinker thing? Hit reply, I read every response.