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

Here is what it should look like to prospect at the top of the funnel.

These are direct quotes from TitanX Go-Live sessions, where customers dial their first TitanX scored list in a pilot.

Reps are starved for conversations. So when they have a handful in a few minutes, they are ecstatic.

Instead, typically we hear that most days “I'm just speeding through and knowing that I'm gonna get an answer.”

The phone never totally stopped working.

We just left it for dead, chased after automation and now AI, and then wondered why our outbound efforts dried up, lacked a consistent feedback loop, and felt soulless.

In 2015, Jeb Blount wrote:

But even then, Jeb lamented that most sales people were never taught how to use the phone.

The phone never stopped working. The lists feeding it atrophied.

JB Daguené covers this in depth in a recent piece on “List Building Before AI” - “nine out of ten pipeline failures trace back to list quality, not outreach, timing, spam, or activity.”

We see this all the time. Very few sales orgs can repeatedly produce great lists with any consistency.

JB’s general framework for pipe gen failure modes maps neatly to ours: list quality, outreach, timing, spam, activity (we usually break it down: List, Message, Rep, Follow-up). The biggest trap is the list: teams spend months tuning the copy on a list that was never fixable, because list quality lives upstream of everything and gets diagnosed last.

Data vendors became cheap. You’ve heard us beat this drum before (“revops is still the upper limit of your outbound”).

Cheap data caused a spiraling set of behaviors, culminating in multi-line dialing (parallel dialing) becoming normalized for many. (I get tired of defenses of parallel dialing: “They have their place”. They only have their place in a universe plagued by poor data quality. Fix the first constraint first.)

After all, if the numbers you’re calling are poor quality, and you respond be “calling more” - you’ve just turned an accuracy problem into a spam problem.

And with all the concordant rise of sales tech, we haven’t seen the payoff.

I’ve worked in sales tech a few times. Before Joey reached out to me last summer, I had written off the category altogether.

I had watched way too many founders crash and burn selling into the “most important mess” in software. Even without AI, the space was too crowded, the tendency toward VC-backed nepotism too strong, the failure rates too high.

TitanX is different because it gives you back the ability to speak to humans at a sufficient rate to succeed.

The primary reason I joined TitanX was deeply philosophical. Take, for example, this quote from one of our go-live calls:

"I actually liked talking to people back to back because it felt more human. That part of my brain was really engaged."

Together, these things combine into that magic moment when it all clicks, when it all makes sense. When pipe gen doesn’t feel like an impossible boulder to lift.

I’ll leave you with this quote from one of our go-live sessions:

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

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