Thomas Pellegrino runs business development at InvestNext, a real estate investment management platform. The phone had always been their best channel. Email worked. LinkedIn worked. But the phone? That's where deals got made.
Problem: they needed more conversations. At 8-9% connect rates, getting enough at-bats meant endless dialing.
Thomas followed the BDR leaders on LinkedIn. Everyone swore by parallel dialers. More dials, more connects, simple math.
"I've never been a fan of them in the past, but I decided to initially look at those."
Then someone reached out about TitanX. The claim: 25% connect rate.
His immediate reaction?
"If you want me to be completely honest, I thought you guys were full of shit. Like I thought there's no possible way that you could get our connection rate to 25%, because we didn't use any type of parallel dialer or anything before, and I thought we actually had a decent connection rate."
The "Wait, This Can't Be Real" Moment
TitanX offered a pilot. No risk. If it didn't work, refund plus $10,000.
"I think the nice thing you guys do is the pilot program, so you actually get a chance and an opportunity to test it out and see for yourself how it works."
First day. Thomas jumped on a call with Byron and two or three of his BDRs. They threw them right in and started calling.
First call: pickup.
Second call: pickup.
Third call: pickup.
"Right away the very, the first three phone calls we made were actually all connections right off the bat. So right away in my, like, obviously I needed to see more numbers, but right away that was like the immediate impact for me. It was like, wow, this actually might work."
By end of day one: 36% connect rate across about 100 dials.
"Obviously it was a small sample size. Reason why the dials were lower was just because we were having more conversations on the phone, and meaningful conversations too."
But Thomas needed to see it hold. Week one: still high. Week three: still there. Week four: still there.
The Math That Changed Everything
Before TitanX:
- 8-9% connect rate
- Standard July slowdown expected
- Multi-channel approach with phone as best performer
- Considering parallel dialers to increase volume
After TitanX:
- 25% consistent connect rate
- 36% connect rate first day
- July became 5th highest month in company history
- 60-70% of July meetings came from TitanX
- Doubled meeting results vs. last July
Time to Value: First day, first three calls
What Actually Happened
The July That Shouldn't Have Happened
Everyone in sales dreads July. Vacation season. Slow month. Historically one of InvestNext's slower months.
Not this July.
"This month it's actually ended up being the fifth highest month in company history for outbound. Main reason we got there was, I would say 60 to 70% of our meetings that were booked in the month of July came from TitanX."
Compared to last July? Doubled.
"For the month of July, that's like the, since we've been using it, post pilot, our meeting results have doubled from last July. It's like a night and day difference."
The Workflow That Didn't Change
Thomas worried about implementation lift. New tools mean new workflows, training, adoption battles.
TitanX was different.
"With our current workflows, it just fit in seamlessly right off the bat, just because we are already utilizing Apollo and it just, we already had sequences set up. It's pretty easy to set up a call only sequence, specifically to run these and just went out, ran it and saw the results immediately."
The Flow State Discovery
Thomas noticed something about his ramping reps. Four relatively new BDRs on the team. Cold calling is brutal for new reps—50 dials, no answers, then finally someone picks up on dial 51. That first conversation of the day? Guaranteed to be rough.
With TitanX, that changed.
"With this, these reps are starting to get in that flow state where you know, they're having a connection every four dials. So they have that first connection. It goes pretty well. Then they just keep going and going and going. And now when they're having these hour blocks of cold calling, it's so much more productive."
The Excitement That Came Back
The first day Thomas gave TitanX to two AEs to test, he jumped on a call block with them.
"The first four dials. They alternated all, it was pickups, pickup, pickup, pickup. And right away you could see it in their face. They were just excited. They were pumped up."
The team started looking forward to outbound. Not dreading it. Looking forward to it.
"Across the reps, they're now actually looking forward to doing outbound, and they're actually looking forward to making calls because they know, Hey, when I make these calls through TitanX, I'm gonna connect with people. I'm actually gonna have a conversation."
InvestNext posts every meeting in Slack immediately. The energy became contagious.
"As soon as the meeting's booked, everyone sees it, everyone's celebrating it. Everyone is getting excited."
Thomas himself got caught up in it. First day with three BDRs, he was just there to listen and give feedback.
"I actually was just getting so excited that I took 20 to 30 leads myself and started calling with them just because it was very enjoyable. It was super exciting. Like when you're in those group call blocks now, everyone is just pumped up. Everyone's very productive. It's more competitive too."
The Parallel Dialing Question
Thomas has tested them all. High-volume manual dialing. Parallel dialers. He's never liked parallel dialers enough to fully roll them out at a company.
"I've worked for teams where I had my teams just go and dial, like personally, dial a high volume of calls. I've tested out parallel dialers. I've never really liked them too much to the point where we've actually went and ran it fully at a company."
The problem with parallel dialers: quality over quantity gets lost.
"A lot of people think, okay, more dials, more dials, more dials, right? And I think that's why a lot of people right now are going that parallel dialer route, just 'cause they want to get as many phones out as they possibly can. But essentially what it is right now is it's quality over quantity."
With TitanX, reps make one-off calls. They're focused. They can do research before each dial. If two people happen to answer at once in parallel dialing? Someone gets hung up on.
"They're one-off calls. They're not dialing four people at once and let's say if two people happen to answer the phone, one's not getting hung up on. They're still focused. They can still do a little bit of research before they pick up the phone and make that dial to ensure that they're having that meaningful conversation."
The Stakes
If TitanX disappeared tomorrow?
Thomas doesn't mince words: "I'd have a lot of pissed off reps, that's for sure."
The team has adjusted to 25% connect rates. They've adjusted to meaningful conversations. They've adjusted to actually enjoying outbound calling.
Going back would break something.
"The nice thing now is like having TitanX now, I think everyone is getting used to that 25% connection rate, and they're getting used to having these meaningful conversations. And that's the most important thing right now."
Bottom Line
InvestNext stopped chasing dial volume and started having conversations. The result: a business development team that turned the slow month of July into a record month, doubled year-over-year meetings, and actually looks forward to cold calling.
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