Zach Palmear inherited a sales development org at Vanta that was stuck. Not because the reps weren't good. Not because they weren't trying. They were operationalizing their days differently—some prospecting from LinkedIn, some in Outreach, some in Salesforce. The click path was chaos.
But the real problem? Their connect rate had been bleeding out for months. From 8% down to 5%, and in some segments even lower. They were making the calls. Putting in the work. And watching their ability to reach actual humans evaporate.
"Channel diversification has been something we've been heavily focused on," Zach says. "AI has made its place in sales development more so than we probably had expected. Whether that's AI generated content, whether that's auto dialing or parallel dialing, or any signal based prospecting. There's just a lot of noise."
In that noise, the human voice was getting lost.
The "Wait, This Can't Be Real" Moment
When Zach first heard TitanX's claim—that they could 3X connect rates—his response was immediate: skepticism.
"I was definitely a skeptic," he admits. "Hearing some outrageous claims, like we will give you $10,000 if your connect rate doesn't skyrocket by at least 20 to 30%. Outrageous."
Then came the pilot week.
"The moment the hype set in on my end was the first week into our pilot. We were dialing across the board and we were setting at least like 5 to 10X more meetings than we had previously expected within that first week, just from connects on the phone alone."
The TitanX team had put their money where their mouth was.
The Math That Changed Everything
Before TitanX:
- 5-8% connect rate across segments
- Reps dialing into the void
- Channel diversification attempts failing
- Data infrastructure gaps becoming obvious
After TitanX:
- 18-25% connect rate (depending on segment)
- 5-10X more meetings in first week
- Clear prioritization strategy
- Data quality issues surfaced and addressed
Time to Value: 1-2 weeks from implementation to measurable impact
What Actually Happened
The connect rate increase was just the beginning. What Vanta discovered was that TitanX wasn't just a data enrichment layer—it was X-ray vision for their market.
"When we started to implement TitanX, what we actually started to find was our own internal data set was messy and wasn't as accurate," Zach explains. "Once our house was in order, TitanX skyrocketed."
The tool exposed the truth: you can't enrich your way out of bad targeting. But once you know who will actually pick up the phone, you can build a real strategy.
For Vanta, that meant:
- Dedicating resources properly - "I think of it as a flower, the more you water it, it's gonna grow"
- Strategic calling, not spam - Moving away from volume to precision
- Rep confidence - Knowing conversations would happen, not hoping
"It's not a rep led tool, it's an ops led tool. It's a leader led tool. We decide the campaigns, we decide the contacts... Can we prioritize this even a step further and say, what's the propensity of these contacts picking up the phone? So we can call them today, tomorrow, the following week."
The Stakes
If TitanX disappeared tomorrow? Zach doesn't sugarcoat it:
"We would struggle. Our connect rate would decline. We would start to see some meaningful meeting decline across the board. Yes, we would pivot. We would have to find other avenues to figure out what we can do. Are we gonna double dial? Are we gonna continuously rotate numbers and use local dial? All of those are fair and fine, but TitanX has absolutely helped our connect rate and we're seeing the fruits of our labor."
Translation: They'd survive, but they'd be back in the dark, dialing blind and hoping.
The Parallel Dialing Question
Zach's been at organizations doing 75-100 dials per day. He's never been at one using parallel dialing because he's "never been a big fan of auto dialers."
His take after implementing TitanX?
"If I had to choose between going parallel dialing or going the TitanX camp, I would choose TitanX camp all day long. It's a more personalized approach. It's a higher quality approach than just blasting out 200 dials a day and hoping someone picks up the phone."
Bottom Line
Vanta stopped treating outbound like a lottery and started treating it like a science. The result: a sales development org that books meetings based on intelligence, not luck.
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