On The Fuze Got 5x More Cold Call Connects With Less Headcount

The Challenge

Gabrielle Paris had tried everything the conventional outbound playbook had to offer. As Head of Sales at On The Fuze, a CRM consulting and HubSpot services firm, she had watched her BDR team work through parallel dialers, alternative dialing tools, and every variation of the volume approach that promised to move the needle on connect rates. None of it worked.

On a good month the team was connecting with just 3% to 4% of the numbers they dialed. On an average month, it was worse.

The old way of growing required scaling the team: if the conversion rate is fixed, the only thing for it is to add more reps, and push for each rep to output more prospecting activities. On The Fuze hired to compensate for the broken math. Headcount climbed. Costs climbed with it. But connect rates didn't move, because adding reps to a 3% connect rate environment doesn't increase outcomes in even proportion with the added costs.

The team was dialing blind into lists where roughly 80% of the numbers would never produce a live conversation, regardless of how many times they called or how the script was refined.

The problem wasn't effort. Gabrielle's reps were working. The problem was that no one knew which prospects would actually answer. Without that signal, they were forced to grope blindly around in the haystack (contact lists), hoping to stumble upon a needle (a conversation).

She needed a structural fix, not another tool that promised volume and delivered noise.

The Solution

Gabrielle was not a willing convert. "I was 110% skeptic before using TitanX," she said.

She had seen the vendor promises before, which are easy to make in a sales deck. They are considerably harder to prove in the first hour of actual use. So when TitanX entered her evaluation, she didn't start with a full rollout or a lengthy onboarding process. She designed a simple test she could trust and run quickly.

Give just one BDR eighty numbers from a TitanX-scored list. Then ask: do the connect rates the platform promises actually appear when a real rep calls real prospects?

The promised rates materialized in those first 80 dials immediately. The BDR had about sixteen conversations from a list of customers that normally would have yielded just one.

So on The Fuze moved from trial to full deployment within three days. There was no prolonged implementation or configuration, and reps didn't have to change their workflow or tools at all. The BDR team just went rom dialing undifferentiated lists to calling prospects that Phone Intent™ had already identified as reachable: people who, based on their behavioral patterns, were in the 20% of the market that would actually pick up the phone.

Precision instead of volume. That's the approach that works for all TitanX customers, and for Gabrielle and her team, the difference between our approach and her previous volume-based approach was tangible. Every parallel dialer and alternative On The Fuze had tested before had produced weak connection rates and lower-quality conversations. TitanX addressed both at once.

The Results

Before TitanX, On The Fuze's connect rates sat at 3% to 4% in a good month. After rollout, as Gabrielle describes it, "as soon as we started using it, we saw immediately around that 20%."

The team sustained connect rates in the 18% to 23% range over time, not just in the first week. That's five to six times better than their previous average. In their best periods they were able to connect with up to 25% of the prospets they dialed, a benchmark most outbound teams never reach regardless of their data quality.

And of course when reps have more conversations, there are other positive carry on effects. Because reps were reaching more of the right people, they got more at-bats, more practice, more coachable moments, and experienced less drain on motivation. In other words, not only did they have more conversations, they also had better conversations as a direct result.

On The Fuze had been adding headcount to compensate for poor efficiency. Gabrielle was quickly able to abandon that ineffecient growth path.

"We were able to decrease our headcount and actually increase the number of bookings and increase our sales and decrease our cost of acquisition," Gabrielle said.

That sentence is what we do: fewer reps, more bookings, more revenue, lower CAC.

And it just so happens it's also the mandate that every revenue leader carries. "Grow without growing the cost base. Do more with less."

It's exactly what On The Fuze did, not by working harder, but by stopping the practice of dialing blind into a list that was 80% unreachable.

They used a precision approach, and it delivered.

Why TitanX

On The Fuze had tested parallel dialers, power dialers, and data enrichment vendors of all types before arriving at TitanX. Each of those alternatives had made connect rate promises. None had delivered. Most just accelerated the volume of activity or provided more data: not better data and not more effective activity. They didn't change who was on the other end of the phone.

What differentiated TitanX was the fact that it worked when the others hadn't.

"TitanX is the only tool we've actually tried and had success with to get us the connection rates we need," Gabrielle said.

TitanX doesn't dial faster or add volume to a broken list. It identifies which prospects are behaviorally in the 20% of any market that will actually answer a cold call, and it surfaces those prospects before a rep ever picks up the phone.

We solve a different problem. One that Gabrielle hadn't really tried to solve before.

For Gabrielle and On The Fuze, the question is no longer whether precision dialing works. It's how far the model can scale.

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