Silk Cut their SDR Team in Half and Still Outperformed Last Year

The Challenge

Josh Gallagher had been in sales for year, and had seen the steady decline in connect rates.

As Manager of Sales Development at Silk, an enterprise cloud storage company, his team's standard outbound cadence was giving them a 2% connect rate.

That was it. That was the baseline Silk had normalized around.

The team was running a multi-channel motion using calls, email, and LinkedIn, but without any reliable signal about which prospects were actually reachable by phone, every call felt like a hope for a conversation rather than a real plan. Reps were putting in solid effort, and their activity numbers looked defensible. But the conversations weren't materializing, and the pipeline math that follows from a 2% connect rate is brutal: most of the work your team does on any given day produces nothing.

What made the situation harder was that Silk's SDR team had already contracted.

Josh was managing a leaner operation, which meant every percentage point of wasted effort carried more weight than it would have in a larger organization. There was no slack in the system.

Josh had seen enough vendor pitches to develop what he'd describe plainly as professional skepticism. "Certainly there was some skepticism," he said. "I think anytime that you're presented a new tool, and the claims that you have of being able to drastically improve our connection rate, and being in the industry for a while and seeing connection rates drop year over year, you're certainly skeptical."

The Solution

"TitanX Phone Intent™ scoring can materially improve connect rates by identifying the roughly 20% of any market that is behaviorally reachable by phone."

That's exactly the kind of claim Josh had learned to approach with caution. Which is why Silk and TitanX worked together on a no-loss pilot offer for Silk.

To make it easy to discern luck from success, Silk piloted TitanX with just one SDR. TitanX scored 50 contacts, and the SDR spent just 20 minutes calling into the highest scored contacts on the list.

So that's a fast start. There was no lengthy onboarding and no months-long ramp period before results could be assessed. You shouldn't take any vendor on faith. You should see the proof before you need to commit. We believe that includes us, which is why we structure our pilot this way.

That structure mattered to Josh. It matched the way he actually evaluated tools: show me the output before I invest.

The pilot produced five conversations and two meetings in those 20 minutes.

That was enough for Josh.

Silk moved to a full rollout and built a dedicated TitanX P1 cadence around Phone Intent scoring, organizing outreach by tier. With their new faith in and efficiency through cold calling, Silk moved to a phone-heavy motion with tighter lists. LinkedIn remained in the mix as a supporting touch, but the phone became the primary instrument, and Josh's team used TitanX Phone Intent scoring as a filter to determine who was worth dialing.

What Josh found during implementation was that the working relationship extended well beyond standard onboarding, too.

The onboarding process actually uncovered other areas for improvement beyond Phone Intent scoring: friction points specific to how Silk's SDR operation actually functioned. Josh and the TitanX team worked through them collaboratively. TitanX adapted to Silk's motion rather than requiring Silk's motion to adapt.

The Results

"From a day-to-day standpoint, we saw the impact within hours," he said. "From a team standpoint, we saw the impact within weeks."

That speed is what gave Silk the confidence to rebuild its outbound motion around Phone Intent scoring rather than treating TitanX as a supplementary experiment.

Silk's standard outbound cadence had been running at 2%.

With TitanX, Silk achieved a 22% connect rate. An 11x improvement over baseline.

If Josh's SDR team makes a total of 300 dials on any given day, that's the difference between 6 conversations and 66 conversations.

Obviously, that kind of conversation density has follow-on effects in the rest of the pipeline.

Of the 26 stage one opportunities Silk's team created, 75% came from TitanX-scored contacts.‍

"Out of the 26 stage one opportunities that the team has created, 75% of them come from a TitanX scored contact," Josh confirmed. Phone Intent scoring had become, without ambiguity, the single most productive source of qualified pipeline the team had.

These changes meant Silk was able to further reduce its SDR team from seven reps to three and still produce slightly higher results than the prior year.

Three reps outperforming seven is what precision looks like. When the activity your team is putting in is concentrated on the contacts who will actually answer, rather than distributed evenly across a list where 80% of the names will never pick up.

The team's morale shifted alongside the metrics, too. Reps who had been throwing away effort on voicemails were now having real conversations, and real conversations are what the job is supposed to feel like.

Why TitanX

What separated TitanX from the tools Josh had evaluated and discarded before was our willingness to prove the claim before asking for a commitment. The pilot structure addressed his skepticism directly. It didn't ask him to trust the data from someone else's deployment or to accept a projected ROI model built on assumptions. It asked him to run 20 minutes of calls with one rep and see what happened.

And what happened was five conversations and two meetings. That result made the decision straightforward in a way that no case study or feature comparison could have.

And TitanX carried beyond the Pilot. Josh doesn't describe the engagement the way most SDR managers describe vendor relationships:

"We haven't been a customer. We've been more of a partner."

That's the Silk story. A connect rate that moved from 2% to 22%, a pipeline where three out of every four stage one opportunities trace back to a Phone Intent-scored contact, and a team of three producing more than a team of seven did before. As Silk continues to build its outbound motion, Josh intends to deepen the operation around Phone Intent scoring, pushing further into P2 and P3 tiering and continuing to refine the cadence architecture that turned a 20-minute pilot into the foundation of how Silk goes to market.