Welcome to the third TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, targeting, and, of course, Phone Intent™. Read more.
We’re in the twilight hours of a small apocalypse in GTM:
The automation heyday of 2015-2025 has officially collapsed.
Every single marketing and sales channel is becoming increasingly strict, and more than a few now require full-time expertise to provide ROI.
This is especially true of cold email. You’ll find outbound email vendors buried in your spam folders. Open tracking is a bad idea. Links are sometimes a bad idea. Even using any API is a bad idea - Miles Veth tested this with Gmass (arguably the most deliverability-friendly sequencer) and found even it struggles with enterprise spam filters. Cold email is now a contractor’s game - the realm of those who live in Slack communities dedicated to debugging and circumventing the latest spam flagging mechanisms.
Now, you probably thought an email about “a new era of GTM” was going to be about signals, AI and GTM engineering. It’s not, because those things are all in service of “the channel” - the means by which you actually reach a buyer. Those are train cars that run along the rails of email, phone, websites, ads, social media, etc.
Most of you reading this are in sales professions. Most of you are concerned with email, phone and social. And email and phone are the two of those that scale the best.
So what’s actually working…
While connect rates on the phone have been dropping slowly, we still hear on almost every call that the phone is the only thing working. But while more and more sales leaders are aware of this, few reps are ready.
Where did all the reps go?
We have frequent interactions with teams of SDRs and full cycle AEs.
Rare are the moments we feel the client is well-equipped with the team they have in place.
The automation era seems to have created a workforce of SDRs who are not only inexperienced with cold calling, but struggle to believe it works.
Given the fundamental premise of the sales profession is talking to other humans, this seems a bit off.
In their defense, they weren’t sold the SDR role as a super awesome gateway into sales nirvana.
They got the job because they needed a job, or knew someone, or wanted to break into SaaS.
But they didn’t want to be talking to strangers.
(Part of the reason the GTM Engineering profession is rising so quickly is that it gives developer-type personalities - introverts, systems thinkers, happy-in-the-dark-in-the-basement types - a meaningful role to play in revenue creation; let’s be honest, revops didn’t pan out)
So what do we do? Replace them with bots?
How do we build a GTM worthy of 2030? Is it really by betting the house on AI agents?
No. In our last newsletter, we explored why investing in conversations is the best way to AI-proof your GTM. Now, here’s how you can start.
Your Homework: Count the Conversations
If I asked you “how many live conversations your team had this week?” would you be able to answer quickly?
I can answer this in less than a minute, three ways:
Gong (we store cold calls from Frontspin here)
Clay from Gong (Great for analyzing the call and backing up data sync between Gong and Salesforce and HubSpot)
Attive.io (Great for a quick question and answer with some analysis)

Cold Calls (FrontSpin): 84 conversations (54.5%)
Average duration: ~3.1 minutes per call
Total time: ~4.3 hours
Other External Calls: 70 calls (45.5%)
Average duration: ~26.2 minutes per call
Total time: ~30.6 hours
We are a super small team - CEO, CRO and 2 AEs. COO and a technical CSM do a lot of work on pilots. AEs do some cold calling. Our two new SDRs just started this week, so that cold call conversation number is lower than it will be. But note that’s not dials, that’s conversations.
35 hours in front of live humans, from mainly 6 people - is that good, is that bad? I don’t know. No one measures this stuff. We all should. We’ve been trained instead to only think in terms of pipeline. Results.
But if the results have a bad week - how do we know what happened?
Conversation time and count is an easy and powerful diagnostic tool.
If conversations volume dipped, it’s an obvious clue as to why results dipped. If conversations spiked, then with training and enablement and learning, results will grow.
But there’s more to this than Conversations = Results:
Why we aim for “Activations”
We have a disposition strategy that many sharp minds have honed over time. “Meetings” is not the only outcome. “Activations” is a main target as well.
This is when someone asks for follow up or otherwise expresses interest but doesn’t book time.
It works because it allows us to stack wins on top of each other: an Activation today is a Meeting in a couple weeks or a month.
There’s a concept that keeps coming up related to this as well - Nurture.
Nurture is a means to grow small amounts of success into large amounts over time.
It’s often referred to as “email nurture” or “marketing nurture” (I’ve only heard a tiny handful of sales people use this term). Marketers fell out of love with it years ago.
Nurture Needs a Resurrection
I remember the first marketing nurture sequence I had to manage.
It was in Marketo. It was wretched. Marketo is still wretched.
If you’re a sales type human reading this, and you haven’t ever logged in to Marketo, here’s a screenshot (I apologize in advance).

A UX Nightmare with Market Dominance
It is the most hideous user experience I have ever encountered in SaaS. Not only does it look ugly, but it is unintuitive, clunky, confusing. (It’s also what’s kept them in business: companies with Marketo need to hire experts who can navigate its labyrinthine qualities. That, and unparalleled email deliverability.)
I hated the work. Each one of those rows in that screenshot is an email (no worries if you couldn’t tell, Marketo was early to the emoji game but failed it miserably).
But man, if you launched a nurture sequence with evergreen content that resonated, a lot of good things would happen to engagement and conversions.
— The same is still true for all channels: program for follow-up, and your business will grow —
Marketing nurture was just too hard to manage, relative to the impact. So we marketers, as a group, left it behind.
The real tragedy is: we never taught nurture to our sales counterparts.
I’m convinced that if Marketo’s nurture concepts, rate-limiting, and deliverability had been paired with Outreach’s ease-of-use and sales-oriented data structures, spamageddon could have been prevented, or at least mitigated.
Instead we gave sales leaders nuclear red buttons (in the form of email sequencers) and suggested they go big or go home. They, in turn, didn’t study the channel, turned up the volume, and decided that fresh leads into fresh sequences was the only way to operate.
They Never. Followed. Up.
And there you have it: if you take…
A culture that increasingly devalues live conversations
A toolset that does nothing to encourage or support consistent follow-up with interested people
A mindset that brings to the forefront the joint maxims that “everything should be automated” and “a good asynchronous email sequence should be able to convert someone into pipeline”
You get a recipe for GTM disaster.
And we haven’t even touched on the specifics of email deliverability, or LinkedIn’s crackdowns.
So here’s what you can do today:
Measure your conversations
Find new ways to create conversations (better cold calling dispositions, better nurture, better targeted live chat, etc.)
Be very careful with at-scale attempts at automation unless you have an expert handling the nuclear red button. Outsource cold email infrastructure just like marketers outsource SEO: to someone whose full-time job it is to stay ahead of the game.
Thanks for reading,
Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)