Watch the full Revolt! session on YouTube
At Revolt! this week, Joey Gilkey, founder and CEO of TitanX, made the case that outbound got worse because of the volume we threw at it. Parallel dialers, more sequences, more reps: every lever teams pulled to cover falling connect rates made the next quarter harder.
He brought receipts from TitanX's research lab, which has studied hundreds of millions of dials across hundreds of companies. At one of them, 8,000 single-line dials booked more meetings than 208,000 parallel ones. TitanX presented the session, and the full recording is below.
Your nurture needs an exit
An e-book download from four months ago shouldn’t outrank a buyer researching your category this week.
ZoomInfo’s GTM team built a system that scores around 100,000 contacts and:
Pulls in intent, web visits, engagement and job changes
Lets old signals decay automatically
Routes contacts to a rep’s priority list when fresh activity crosses a threshold
About 5,000 buyers have gone from cold to warm. The play breaks down the scoring model, five-email sequence and handoff to sales.
What you’ll learn
The three eras of outbound, from the craftsman rep to the factory floor to the volume era we're still inside
Why 29% of the average company's phone numbers are flagged as spam, and what that costs in payroll
The parallel efficiency fallacy: 80 dials per meeting against 2,420, same list, same reps
How 45 reps matched the meetings of 123 for $9.3M less
Three moves that take cost per meeting from $9,300 to $2,504 without buying anything new
Session Highlights
02:25 - The Navy SEAL story and the ratio of preparation to action
06:02 - The craftsman, factory, and volume eras
11:24 - March 2024, the month the cash ran out
12:24 - Spreadsheet magic and the do-more-with-less mandate
14:50 - 29% of numbers flagged as spam
16:11 - $4.3M of payroll lost to spam dials
16:37 - Single-line versus parallel dialing
17:36 - The parallel efficiency fallacy case study
20:11 - Reps call each prospect 2.5 times
20:29 - 22 reps booked 256 meetings, 53 reps booked zero
21:17 - Cutting to 45 reps and saving $9.3M
22:20 - Cost per meeting from $9,300 to $2,504
24:30 - The four things outbound comes down to
25:26 - The TitanX precision era launch
32:03 - Q&A: signals, LinkedIn, and TitanX's own pipeline
Key Takeaways
1. The volume era is ending because the math broke
Joey splits outbound into three eras. The craftsman rep owned a deal from cold call to renewal. Predictable Revenue split that job into an assembly line of SDRs, AEs and CSMs, and cheap capital let teams scale it with headcount. After 2020, connect rates slid from the teens to low single digits, and teams answered with more dials, more sequences and more automation. In March 2024 excess savings ran out, and the mandate became do more with less.
2. Spam is a payroll problem
Of the hundreds of companies TitanX analyzed, four had fewer than 5% of their numbers flagged as spam. The average is 29%, whatever dialer the team uses. In a sample of 28 companies, 694,639 dials went out from flagged numbers nobody would pick up. At 61 dials a rep per day and $100K fully loaded, that's $4.3M of payroll, about $154K per company.
3. Parallel dialing creates the problem it promises to fix
Numbers used for single-line dialing get flagged 1.1% of the time. Parallel dialing pushes that to 27%. Strip every spam dial out and single-line still connects at 10.6% against 5% for parallel. One company made 96% of its 220,000 dials on a parallel dialer, and its 8,000 single-line dials still booked more meetings: 80 dials per meeting against 2,420.
4. Headcount won't buy you pipeline
Two teams at a company everyone knows made about the same number of dials to the same lists. The 22-rep team booked 256 meetings. The 53-rep team booked zero. At a unicorn, keeping the top 45 of 123 reps and moving them to single-line dialing matched the full team's 1,144 meetings for $5.4M instead of $14.7M.
5. Subtract before you buy
Joey's model for a 1,200-rep org starts at $9,300 per meeting. Cutting reps with real dial volume and no meetings drops it to $7,242. Moving the rest from parallel to power dialing takes it to $2,504, and fixing spam saves roughly another $300. None of those moves needs new software, and each one makes the CFO more willing to fund the next.
"Cheap activity can be extraordinarily expensive production."
6. Outbound comes down to four things
His closing argument: outbound runs on the right list, the right message, the right rep, and systematic follow-up. What every past era lacked was a way to see which of those four is broken and a place to fix it. TitanX launched its answer on stage, and his take on which signals are worth chasing closes the session.
If you're enjoying these, reply and tell me what you'd love to learn more about: dialing data, rep productivity, cost per meeting, anything.
Catch you next week,
Jared
P.S. Joey is on LinkedIn if you want to compare dialing data. Also, always growing our RevGenius community; you can join here to follow along.
Upcoming events
Revolt! 2026 Demo Day 1
Wednesday, November 4 | 12 PM ET / 9 AM PT
Revolt! covered the ideas. Demo Day shows you the products behind them. ZoomInfo, Airspeed, and TitanX each walk through their product live, with time for your questions in the chat.
Revolt! 2026 Demo Day 2
Thursday, November 5 | 12 PM ET / 9 AM PT
Three more live demos from Goldcast, Syft, and Firmable, focused on turning content into pipeline and finding the accounts worth working.
Know The Buyer, The Tech, The Pitch
Tuesday, November 10 | 3 PM ET / 12 PM PT
Your reps know the buyer's name, title, and company size before the first call. They usually don't know what software that company runs. Chester Thompson (VP Americas) and Alec Van Cleve (Enterprise Sales Manager) of Firmable on closing that gap before the pitch.
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