100x more sales tech. Half the success.

This is the TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, and the precision that makes them possible - Read more.

When I was at Convoy, our SDR lead told me: if you can do anything to simplify, that will go a long way.

I knew what he meant. Simplify processes, workflows, technology, tasks.

Honestly, I never felt like I made much of a dent. But his request (or admonition?) has stuck with me ever since.

If you're in marketing like me, you've watched a literal 100x boom in technology over the last decade. Sales tech usually gets lumped into the broader martech landscape, because analysts don't want to bother with the smaller sales tech universe (and big companies don't buy it nearly as much).

But the boom hit sales tech too. We just don't get our own landscape slide (though ChiefMarTech does give sales a section.

It came up again in my 1:1 with Joey last week. He's been chewing on simplification as a strategy, and we kept circling the same question. When did this get so complex? Sales should be simple, and the tech is the reason it isn't.

My working hypothesis is a little deflating, which is that nobody set out to make this complicated. Every tool got bought for a reason.

Outbound used to be simple because simple worked. A list, a phone, a calendar.

Then it got hard. Connect rates that used to run 15 or 20% slid down to ~5. Email reply rates drifted lower every year. And when the simple version stops clearing the bar, you don't just accept the worse number, you reach for something. Better data. A sequencer. A dialer, then a faster dialer. Each one a (theoretically) reasonable answer to a real problem.

As far as I can tell, that’s the pattern: The complexity isn't really a mistake, it's just what difficulty does to you. Constraints engender complexity. “Necessity is the mother of invention” might also mean “overkill” - we didn't overbuild because we were careless, we overbuilt because the work got hard, and we kept re-bandaging the wound.

The math is the part that hurts:

If all that tooling were doing its job, the success should be climbing, and it just isn't. Something like 100x the tools, and roughly half the conversations per rep we had a decade ago. That's a lot of $$$ to spend on a treadmill.

I think most of us quietly land in one of two camps when we look at this. Some people want it gone, tired of running twelve tools to book one meeting, and "simplify" sounds like oxygen. Other people are wired the other way, perfectly content in the weeds, happy to tune the machine forever. Find yourself somewhere on that line (I move around on it depending on the week, honestly). Both reactions are reasonable.

I don't think "simplify" means rip it all out (not just saying that because we sell software). The difficulty is real and it isn't going anywhere: Attention got scarce, and it doesn't come back because I'm feeling nostalgic for a cleaner stack.

You can't un-invent the problem by un-buying the tools.

So what is all of this actually for? Strip away the enrichment and the sequences and the dialers, and what is the job underneath all of it?

A conversation.

Two people talking, and that's the thing that actually moves a deal, or holds someone's attention long enough to change their mind. (You literally exist because two people had a conversation. I'll let your parents fill in the rest.)

Everything in the stack is either a stand-in for that conversation, a path to it, or a way to have more of them. And I think that might be what my old SDR lead was really asking for, even if neither of us could have said it that cleanly at the time. Simplifying was never about owning fewer tools - it was about not losing the plot.

Which changes what "cut through the noise" even means to me now. I'm less interested in bolting on another channel and more interested in the boring question of whether the first move lands at all.

Did you reach an actual person, and did you get to talk to them?

When that happens, a lot of what comes after sorts itself out. When it doesn't, no stack on earth saves you, and you're just one more bit of noise in a market that's already drowning in it.

I don't have a tidy answer here. The honest version is that the goal was never the size of the stack at all - it was the conversation, the whole time. Maybe that's the simplification my Convoy colleague was nudging me toward all those years ago, and I just didn't have the words for it yet.

Right now, everyone is messing with AI to build things for GTM, internally and as founders. But if you map touchpoints by conversation-fidelity (real-time, rapport building, objection handling live between humans) and scaleability, what stands out are live meetings (of course) and cold calls. Everything else makes a tradeoff that moves it out of the frontier (the sweet spot). Focus on the frontier:

Anyway. Pick up the phone.

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

P.S. Where do you fall on the simplify-versus-tinker thing? Hit reply, I read every response.