This is the TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, targeting, and, of course, Phone Intent™ - Read more.
TitanX is in the HubSpot App Marketplace
For our customers using HubSpot CRM, scoring contacts for Phone Intent is easier, faster, and more controllable than ever.
Now, you can:
Submit entire contact lists for scoring with one click
Schedule list submissions
Track scoring results in real time
See contact scoring status and history
…all without leaving HubSpot.
Food for thought before you dive into the new HubSpot integration…
List-building is the most underrated skill in GTM.
The list is what happens right before you start spending all your money: everything downstream depends on it.
Sales prospecting: Starts with a list
ABM campaigns: Starts with a list
LinkedIn ads: Starts with a list
Follow-up sequences: List
Win-back campaigns: List.
Champion outreach: List.
When a single task has that many dependencies, it is by default a high-leverage activity.
Some people are good at it, some aren’t. Either way, it shows. I've worked in GTM at 3 unicorns and dozens of startups. Some successes, some failures, and the make-or-break in every case was one thing:
The quality of the lists and how seriously they took the list-building process.
Not "did they have ZoomInfo or Apollo?"
I mean: did anyone build that list with a strategy behind it? Do reps know exactly who to call, and why? Can they have 15+ conversations a day because the numbers actually connect? Can they get into a flow state because the list is coherent, not a scattered mess of different prospect personas?
The teams hitting 120%+ attainment aren't "doing more outbound."
They've figured out that list-building is the single highest-leverage skill in GTM. The teams that consistently sit at 80% quota attainment treat list-building like an admin task.
How is this normal?
Here’s how most teams build lists:
Pull everyone matching a few ICP filters from a database.
Load it into a Sales Engagement Platform so SDRs can run sequences
Let SDRs decide who to sequence or call first.
That’s pretty much it.
So reps dial 100 numbers. Four calls connect. Three are wrong numbers. The one person that picks up talks to your rep who has no real context about why that person should talk to them other than “you fit our ICP”.
And that conversation costs roughly $47.
And then they accept that poor performance and call it “industry benchmark”.
Meanwhile, a team with purpose-built, scored lists gets 25 connects from the same 100 dials, twenty conversations, five meetings booked.
Their conversations cost $8.
That's a 6x efficiency gap right at the top of the funnel. So it compounds across every channel you run, and at every step down-funnel.
Your lists matter so, so much.
But again and again I see GTM leaders trying to optimize the wrong layer, fiddling around with cadence step order, more signals, AI note-takers, follow-up automations, etc.
All that stuff is great. But it's lipstick on a pig if your lists are built from a bulk export that nobody spent more than 10 minutes thinking about.
What ‘good’ looks like
A bad list doesn't just waste money. It also makes your outbound motion undiagnosable.
When 95%+ of your outreach results in dead air, you can't tell if you're failing to get their attention or failing to reach them at all. If everybody on the list is just there because “maybe they’ll have a need”, any signals you do get from the market are impossible to separate from the noise inherent in the sample (your list).
So if pipeline isn’t materializing, leaders are left to choose between a set of equally unwise assumptions. The messaging is wrong, the reps are weak, the market doesn't want the product, there’s not enough activity, marketing isn’t providing enough air-cover.
They fire the team, kill the channel, and move on just because nobody ever took the time to make a great list.
Here's what a strategic list has that a bulk export doesn't:
Purpose-built targeting
Not "Directors at SaaS companies." That's generic. Instead: "Directors of Sales Ops at 50–200 person SaaS companies who hired 10+ SDRs in the last six months and use Salesforce." Specificity creates relevance. Relevance creates conversations.
Verified unique identifiers
Every contact needs a working phone number, a verified work email, or a LinkedIn profile URL. If you can't uniquely identify and reach them, they don't belong on the list.
A hypothesis
Your list itself should answer: "Why should these people care?" If you can't state it, the list isn't strategic enough and your reps will have nothing meaningful to say.
Feedback loops
How your list is built list should allow you to refine targeting based on results and call dispositions. A too-broad list with great dispositions still results in no insight because the signal is lost in the noise from contacts who never should have been prospected in the first place.
(This is how list-building becomes the engine for discovering product-market fit, keeping it, and gleaning market insights, not just executing against assumptions.)
A refresh cadence
People change jobs, companies get acquired, contacts go stale - you know all this. Great lists are maintained, not just built.
Maybe you’re thinking, “well, that’s not easy.” Good. You should recognize that it’s hard to get this right, and that the effort is worth it.
Stop making your lists on easy mode.
What to do instead
Pick your worst-performing segment right now. Here’s how you can rebuild a list with more intention:
Start with a hypothesis, not a filter.
Define who you're targeting and why they should care. The hypothesis drives the filter logic, not the other way around.
Thoroughly enrich before you load.
Run every contact through multiple data sources. You’ve probably heard of or are familiar with waterfall enrichment - it’s not a bad idea but not a silver bullet. It essentially hunts for the first detectable phone number or email for a prospect. So remember that enriching via multiple providers separately actually gives you a fuller picture than a first-come-first-serve waterfall.
Score for reachability.
We at TitanX built Phone Intent™ for exactly this step. It identifies the ~20% of any market that will actually answer a cold call, based on observed behavioral data across over a billion dials.
Reps call the high intent contacts first and stop burning hours on the 80% who won't pick up regardless. (Park Place Technologies used this to drop from 320 dials per booked meeting to 84.)
Build the feedback loop into your workflow.
Every call outcome should refine the next list. Dispositions aren't just CRM hygiene. They're targeting intelligence.
Rescore and refresh quarterly.
Roughly 20% of any market shifts between high and low reachability over the course of a year. A list that was gold in January can be stale by April.
If you want help with any of that, we offer pilots.
We’ll 3x your connect rate or pay you $10k.
The list is the strategy
Every dollar you've spent on outbound was impacted by your list quality, and every downstream metric depends on it. Your CAC, your sales cycle length, your pipeline coverage ratio, your rep morale.
Note too that every channel suffers from reachability issues: some people respond to cold email, some to linkedin DMs, some to ads, some to the phone. You can continue to blast everyone like they’re the same. But it hurts.
Or instead, you can dig into who picks up the phone vs who doesn’t, then approach the rest of the market accordingly.
For what it’s worth, Kevin Dorsey was a self-described "massive skeptic" before his team moved from 11–12% connect rates to 27–29% consistently. That didn't come from hiring better reps. It came from knowing who would answer before anyone picked up the phone.
Do the hard work of building your lists the right way, and all of a sudden everything else gets easier. All because you're finally talking to the right people.
Most of your competitors haven't figured this out yet.
The list is the strategy. Everything else is downstream.
Thanks for reading,
Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)
P.S. What do you think is the hardest thing about list-building? Hit reply. I’ll help if I can.