---
title: "Outbound Isn't Dying. Yours Is."
episode: 114
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Joey Gilkey"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO"
date_published: 2026-09-09
date_modified: 2026-09-14
duration: 01:07:29
word_count: 13514
topics: ["outbound-sales", "sales-leadership", "ai-in-gtm", "sales-enablement", "gtm-strategy"]
canonical_url: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/joey-gilkey-titanx-8000-dials-beat-200000/
source: "LeanScale Knowledge Hub — https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Outbound Isn't Dying. Yours Is. — Full Transcript

> Episode 114 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Joey Gilkey.
> Published September 9, 2026 · 01:07:29 · 13514 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/joey-gilkey-titanx-8000-dials-beat-200000/

## 00:00 — Cold open + intro

**[0:00]** Joining me today is Joey Gilkey, founder and CEO of Titan X and the person who

**[0:05]** decided the most valuable thing in Outbound was not a better message. It was

**[0:09]** knowing which prospects will actually pick up the phone. So I had to make the very painful and

**[0:14]** very financially difficult decision for myself and my family to shut down a

**[0:18]** growing and fairly decent sized services company to go pursue a technology that

**[0:23]** basically was at zero revenue. A lot of people are getting obsessed with just

**[0:29]** getting every bit of efficiency out of their system. I think there's two ways.

**[0:34]** There's effectiveness that you can get with AI power and then there's

**[0:39]** efficiency which really has a diminishing return at a certain point but

**[0:43]** how do you think about that and where do you think it's going to be going in the future?

**[0:47]** So it took 30 times the amount of dials to get the same outcome parallel dialing

**[0:52]** as it did just single and matter. So a lot of it's the infrastructure behind it. So if you parallel dial,

**[0:57]** I'm placing one call from one phone number to one person. It's like the conversation at the

**[1:02]** power cost of going to market because I can get all this stuff that you can't get

**[1:05]** from third-party intent tools, you can't get from data providers, I can get it from the conversation.

**[1:09]** Let's assume it was conversationally there. I do still think there's a difference between

**[1:14]** connecting with someone and knowing that it's trust is on the other side.

**[1:18]** It's trust. I think you and I talked before. Outbound is not dying but yours is.

**[1:27]** [Music]

## 01:30 — Turning off a $6.5M business to start over at zero

**[1:30]** Joey, in 2023, you bought a company for its IP and then you looked at these

**[1:34]** six and a half million dollars in revenue you already had in one business and decided to turn

**[1:40]** it off and start a software company at zero. Take me inside the room where you made that call.

**[1:46]** Yeah, I think you have to back up to my full career. I've been an entrepreneur since 2017.

**[1:51]** I did sell a company in 2020 which was also a services company.

**[1:56]** Since then, I hate this word because I think it doesn't actually mean that much. Being a serial

**[2:02]** entrepreneur, I think that means something if you keep stacking companies and you have a bunch of

**[2:06]** successes over decades. But I think if serial entrepreneur means you just start a bunch of

**[2:11]** companies over a couple of years, it doesn't mean that much but that was me.

**[2:16]** So I started a number of companies. I could admittedly say that they're all "successful"

**[2:20]** financially but not both from a purpose perspective and for me,

**[2:29]** services can only go so far. I've never lost that edge of services. I'm very passionate about

**[2:35]** services but the vehicle in which you deliver services really matters to me from a scale

**[2:39]** perspective. If we go into that time, I had this exit in 2020. I had some side ventures that were

**[2:47]** doing well, spending off good cash flow for me and the family and it was great.

**[2:51]** But then I built Apex Revenue which was the services company you talked about that

**[2:56]** eventually acquired the IP. That company was going well. We had a lot of momentum and motion

**[3:01]** around what we were doing. Building a pretty sizable team at the time. We had a big office

**[3:07]** in downtown Knoxville. It was moving people to Knoxville and all these things were happening.

**[3:12]** But in that time of running the services company, you run into a lot of bottlenecks.

**[3:17]** You start to see a lot when you start getting inside, deep inside of Org. We were a fractional

**[3:21]** VP of Sales and CRO company that had an outsourced sales arm to it. As we started to get deeper into

**[3:28]** Org, we started to realize that there were some serious headwinds coming in the market that were

**[3:31]** actually accelerated through COVID that actually started back in the early 2010 area. We got a

**[3:39]** hold of this really obscure technology through a partnership. He's actually a foe of mine in an old

**[3:47]** life. We were competitors. We both exited about the same time. He went and solved a different

**[3:51]** problem than I did. We kept in touch and eventually started using this super boutique,

**[3:56]** obscure, very expensive, very slow, but very powerful intellectual property that he possessed.

## 04:03 — The moat is worth more than the castle it's protecting

**[4:03]** The more that I built Apex, the more I realized if I want to have a moat around this services

**[4:08]** company, I need to go buy that thing. I need to own the property. I did that by a year of negotiating.

**[4:14]** Finally got a struck a deal, cut them a check in August of '23 and acquired it. In hindsight,

**[4:23]** I seem brilliant. I was not. I thought I'm going to have this intellectual property. I'm going to

**[4:26]** shut it off from the market, take it down to zero in revenue, and it's going to be the moat around

**[4:30]** Apex and allow Apex, the service company, to scale. About six months in that endeavor, I realized that

**[4:36]** yes, that was true. It was unique, but what people loved about Apex was our access to this very unique

**[4:42]** intellectual property. People started asking about like, can we just have that? Can we have access to

**[4:47]** that? I sat down and you asked what was the conversation going on in the room? It wasn't

**[4:53]** in a room. It was actually on my farm. I live on a 70 acre ranch in Tennessee. I'm sitting outside.

**[4:58]** I'm just looking at the pasture. It had recently been hayed by the farmers that we trade hay with,

**[5:03]** and I was looking at all these bales of hay and just sitting and thinking. I started to realize

**[5:09]** I built a moat around the castle where the moat, I believe, is more valuable than the castle it's

**[5:14]** protecting. Fast forward to early '24, made the decision to say, "Well, let me just go kind of

**[5:21]** precede the idea to a few people," and instantly lashed on because the problem became so acute in

**[5:26]** the market. I was like, "Man, there's something to this," and so I went and found a CTO that I could

**[5:30]** bring in who would kind of build an MVP for me. We decided to tell the market we were doing at May 1st

**[5:36]** to pre-sale beta users. We sold 200 beta users in May. June, we turned the platform on, and from

**[5:42]** there, we just took off. The moment we took off, it became very evident to me that I can't serve two

**[5:48]** masters, so I wasn't going to run Apex and this company at the same time. I had to make the very

**[5:53]** painful and very financially difficult decision for myself and my family to shut down a growing

**[5:59]** and fairly decent-sized services company to go pursue a technology that basically was at zero

**[6:04]** in revenue but had a lot of potential. Longer answer, but that's the background.

## 06:09 — Why he bet the house on the phone

**[6:09]** No, I love it, and those are such difficult decisions to make, especially when the opportunity

**[6:15]** cost is potentially as high as it is. I'm curious, outside of, "Hey, this is a tech that can scale.

**[6:23]** This is a moat that I can plug in anywhere," was there anything in the market that was leading you

**[6:28]** to believe that, "Hey, the next two potentially five-year horizon, this is why this bet is going

**[6:35]** to really pay off"? Yeah, there's two big ones, one of which was automation in the late 20s into the

**[6:43]** early 2020s. Shot out like a cannon. You had all these different tools that essentially made volume

**[6:49]** the play. Like, "Okay, well, effectiveness isn't great, but volume can kind of make up for the

**[6:53]** effectiveness gap." You get automation tools that allow you to send an insane amount of emails and

**[6:58]** do LinkedIn automation and all the things until LinkedIn throttled everybody and shut down

**[7:02]** everything. But what I started to see was there's this big frontier that's like, you know how it's

**[7:08]** like what is now new or what is now the best thing in the market is actually something of old.

**[7:15]** The only way forward is to look into the past. I started to see that there's, and I've always

**[7:22]** been a phone guy, right? Go to market. I think the phone is the most powerful channel. I've got

**[7:26]** reasons behind that. I could talk about that, but I started to see this like skepticism and or like

**[7:31]** just general flatness around email, not delivering. And people basically abandoned the phone for the

**[7:37]** most part for years. And I started to see this resurgence of people going back to the phone.

**[7:42]** And so there's this wave of that where people are running back to this channel that I know the

**[7:46]** most about. And I had this technology that can solve a problem around. Simultaneously, just like

**[7:51]** with email and LinkedIn, when saturation comes about, commoditization comes about. And so then

**[7:56]** you start to see connect rates on the phone. I make 100 dials. I used to be able to talk to 15 people.

**[8:01]** I make 100 dials. I could talk to 10 people. And then it was like seven. And then it was five. And

**[8:05]** you're watching this trend of the connect rate. How many people I can talk to on the same amount of

**[8:08]** dials dropping. And we had this solution that changed that entire economic model and flipped

**[8:14]** it on its head where it's, well, you can make $100 and talk to 25 people. What does that do for the

**[8:18]** economics of the business? And so I think it was the right time, the right place, call it providence.

**[8:25]** It was where you see people moving to a channel. And you also simultaneously see the headwinds and

**[8:30]** the big wave coming at that channel at the same time. And so I think we're just at this perfect

**[8:35]** intersection. And so that was ultimately what I saw and then what I decided to just bet the house on.

**[8:42]** Literally, actually, I did bet the house. I lost millions of dollars over the past couple of years

**[8:49]** until I made a lot more than that. But yeah, it was a painful sacrifice, but a worthwhile bet.

## 08:56 — The only outbound channel that talks back

**[8:56]** Yeah, those tend to be the best ones to make, though. I would love your perspective on

**[9:03]** phone. I think we work with a ton of B2B SaaS companies. I think very few of them

**[9:09]** are even leveraging phone or even know it feels like it kind of got lost after 2020

**[9:16]** because email and LinkedIn was probably working OK. And then the art of how to do the dials,

**[9:23]** even even what to do on the phone. But I would love to hear your perspective on

**[9:27]** why it's such an effective channel and how to do it right.

**[9:31]** Yeah, so I'll start just philosophically. I think the phone is the only I'll say I'll say outbounds,

**[9:36]** but you could probably apply this to a lot of channels. But it's the only outbound channel

**[9:39]** which I get to deliver and add to an intended prospect where I will get instant bidirectional

**[9:47]** feedback in a conversation. I don't get that with email. I get a yes, I get a no, I get an unsubscribe,

**[9:52]** I get nothing. LinkedIn, very similar. Yes, no, don't message me, block me, whatever. But the phone

**[10:00]** is a unique channel which I get to actually converse in live time and catch someone where

**[10:04]** I can deliver an ad. All cold calling is it's telemarketing, telephone marketing. And so it's

**[10:11]** we call it conversational advertising is like I have the ability to deliver a tailored ad to my

**[10:17]** intended target. I'm not worried about Facebook's algorithms on or whether meta can actually target

**[10:22]** this person. I'm not worried about LinkedIn and their cost per whatever. It's I can I can deliver

**[10:26]** this about the right phone number for them to this person if they pick up and I can have a conversation

**[10:31]** that that I can glean insight, Intel and interest from. Yes, I can generate a meeting, but also I

**[10:37]** can generate insight and Intel. And so I think that's why that's my philosophy around the phone

**[10:42]** is it's the only channel which I get that and that if I if I treat that sacred, which is I think that

**[10:47]** the conversation is the atomic unit of go to market, right? If I can get conversations, I can

**[10:52]** glean insight Intel. If I can glean insight Intel, I can then write better email copy, I can then

**[10:57]** send better LinkedIn, I can then create more targeted ads after I can create better content

**[11:01]** for my for my named accounts. And so I think that's the biggest thing around the phone.

**[11:06]** One one of the things you mentioned, I don't think people are even thinking about.

**[11:09]** I think they would judge all of the success on did I book a meeting? And I'm not even sure if

**[11:14]** they're capturing the intelligence to feed their marketing engine to use that as a huge, huge,

**[11:21]** but it's a huge mess. It's a mess. I mean, now that we have AI and we have conversational

**[11:25]** intelligence, you have every transcript of every call. You have AI that can make sense of it,

**[11:29]** you have AI that can be trained on what signals matter to you, and it can be creating a repository

**[11:33]** of signals per account that you can then feed to other. This is why I say it's the it's like the

**[11:38]** mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, like the conversation at the powerhouse of go to market,

**[11:43]** because I can get all this stuff that you can't get from third party intent tools,

**[11:46]** you can't get from data providers, I can get it from a conversation. So we get it from a

**[11:50]** conversation, I can now distribute that insight in those signals to other channels, other departments

**[11:55]** within the organization, and so on. And so when it comes to doing it well, one, you have to have

**[12:01]** this core belief that the conversation is of extreme value. That's why I say it's the atomic

**[12:07]** unit of go to market, because if you think about physics, you have subatomic particles,

**[12:11]** which is like your data, your dialers, the protons and neutrons. Then you have your matter,

**[12:17]** which is the most important thing, which is like the table, we're sitting in front of the microphone,

**[12:21]** but you can't have the really valuable stuff unless you stack the atoms, which is the conversation.

**[12:28]** And so how do you do this? Well, as one, you believe that the conversation holds immense

**[12:32]** value outside of just booking appointments, it's not just the tip of the spear for for

**[12:35]** setting appointments or meetings. And so what we talk about without bound is outbound in itself

## 12:41 — The four pillars: list, messaging, rep, follow-up

**[12:41]** and phone specifically, phone that outbound is simple, but it's not easy. And I have to give that

**[12:47]** caveat of the difference in the two. Why is it simple is because it comes down to getting four

**[12:51]** things right. If you get the four pillars about bound, right with the phone, you will absolutely

**[12:55]** scale the crap out of, of, of outbound. The four pillars are pretty simple. It's list messaging.

**[13:03]** It's the rep and it's the followup. Right. So list is am I targeting the right accounts and the right

**[13:08]** people and contacts within those accounts? And do I have good data quality on those contacts?

**[13:12]** The messaging is am I saying and delivering the right message to the right contacts at the right

**[13:18]** accounts? The rep is who is delivering that message? Are they ramped correctly? Are they

**[13:21]** trained correctly? They're doing the right inputs to deliver the right message to the right list.

**[13:25]** And then because we're not knockout artists, where we believe that everything's about setting

**[13:28]** the meeting, then you have to have systematic followup in there, right? In outbound specifically,

**[13:33]** it's pretty good if you can book a meeting 10% of the time you have a conversation. 15 is really

**[13:38]** good. So therefore that the inverse is true. I failed 85, 90% failed. And so what do I do with

**[13:45]** those people? Well, that's where followup comes in. And we say the fat stacks are in the circle backs

**[13:48]** is how do you do systematic followup? So the reason I say it's important is the conversation

**[13:54]** at the core of this flywheel, if you will, these four pillars is the conversation gives me feedback

**[14:00]** on whether or not my list and my targeting is good. The conversation gives me feedback on whether

**[14:04]** this messaging is landing, or if I tweak this messaging, AB tested these two different scripts,

**[14:08]** this one works better than that one. The conversation is what actually ramps the rep and

**[14:12]** gets them better at delivering the message to the right list. And the conversation,

**[14:16]** because we're not knockout artists, is going to feed a massive follow bucket where a lot of our

**[14:20]** future wins are going to come from. And so when you do outbound well, it's you have an attention

**[14:24]** to detail to these four pillars. And you leverage the conversation in the middle of that to diagnose

**[14:30]** what is going right or wrong or who is going right or wrong within this flywheel.

## 14:35 — Anatomy of a cold call script

**[14:35]** What does the anatomy of a script look like, especially, as you put it, you're not designing

**[14:41]** it just to be a knockout artist, but you're designing it to capture more? How do you structure

**[14:45]** that conversation? Yeah, I mean, there's always this argument like to do permission based openers,

**[14:51]** or do you know, like there's, we ran this test years ago, and we did a live like LinkedIn live

**[14:56]** on this. And we were like, Hey, let's take 10 of the most popular intros to a script. And let's

**[15:02]** see if any of them outperform the others. It doesn't. It doesn't. So there's no hook. That's

**[15:07]** like the hook. I mean, the king, there's a bad way to do it. But there's a lot of good ways.

**[15:11]** Right. And so I'll give an example of ours. So ours is very simple. And there's a psychology

**[15:16]** behind it. The reason I say that it didn't really matter what you said, it's who said it, and how

**[15:20]** you said it is more important. So the tone, the pace, etc. So we bake in things that you would not

**[15:26]** normally put in a script, pauses, um, etc. And so I'll say, Hey, Anthony, this is Joey Gilkey over at

**[15:33]** Titan X. It's actually the first time I've reached him. I was hoping I put that word in there

**[15:38]** specifically, hoping that you could help me out here for a brief moment. Right? It's a gate,

**[15:42]** the gate is I want to let them know that this is a cold call, in the sense that I don't want them

**[15:48]** thinking the back of the brain. What's this about? Why is he calling me, etc. It's like, I haven't

**[15:51]** reached you. I'm hoping you can help me out. People want to be helpful. And so I'm hoping that's a

**[15:57]** psychological word to help people want to be helpful. So then they get past that gate and they

**[16:01]** say, Oh, yeah, sure. What you got? Or yeah, what, you know, tell me what you got. And the next part

**[16:07]** is the second gate, which I read it back to him said, perfect, Anthony. Appreciate that. Again,

**[16:12]** Joey Gilkey, Titan X reason I'm calling. And I want to declare why I'm even here. And then I

**[16:19]** want to kind of get into resonating with them or making it relevant to them. I talked to VPs of

**[16:25]** sales and CROs all day, every day at this point. And I'm kind of hearing like one of two things

**[16:30]** from them. And then I call it what we call pain bucketing. I want to put two buckets of pain in

**[16:35]** front of them for them to self-select which one they live in. So so yeah, I talked to VPs of sales

**[16:41]** and CROs all day, every day. And I tend to hear one of two things. So one is, you know, VPs,

**[16:46]** if I'm talking to VPs, I'll say it this way. VPs are trying to get their account executives to

**[16:51]** self-source their own pipeline, but they're out of the game. They've not been doing that. They've

**[16:54]** had SDRs kind of supporting them. The second thing is they have a pretty robust SDR motion,

**[16:59]** but they're just not getting enough at bats for those SDRs for all the effort they're putting in

**[17:02]** this either those sound like your world at all. And then they either bucket themselves into one or

**[17:08]** both of those buckets, or they tell me no. And I say perfect. That's why I'm calling regardless of

**[17:12]** the answer. So you could say, honestly, no, I've, I'm not experiencing this like, Oh, interesting.

**[17:18]** Well, perfect. It's the reason I'm reaching out. You know, I do talk to a lot of folks who have

**[17:22]** those problems. I'd be curious, how did you go about fixing that? And then it opens up the

**[17:26]** conversation where I can now get intel on the account, they tried this new dialer or whatever,

**[17:32]** or they bucket themselves into the pain that I want and have a talk track that goes all the way

**[17:35]** through. And then you got to have a tight pitch, you got to have a call to action. And then you

**[17:40]** have to disposition the call correctly. That's the most important thing. So that's my general

**[17:45]** framework. It could get a lot more deep, but I'm sure people aren't following entirely.

**[17:49]** No, I think that's super helpful. Just, um, one, knowing it doesn't have to be

**[17:56]** an exact hook formula that you found on LinkedIn somewhere. Um, I think emphasis on tone. And I

**[18:04]** think also what I was reading in there, a bit of emphasis on authenticity. So not lying about the

**[18:12]** reason why you're calling, not doing, you know, respecting the person that you're calling and then

**[18:18]** also being authentic. And I do think it helps saying, Hey, I'm not here just to book a meeting.

**[18:22]** So if I just learned something on this call, that's totally cool too. Yeah.

**[18:25]** I think it helps give whoever's making that phone call a bit of empowerment there too.

## 18:31 — Don't be memorable until it's time to be memorable

**[18:31]** I think it does. Yeah. You have to realize that you don't want to be actually a buddy of mine,

**[18:35]** Ryan Reisert, who's pretty well known in this cold calling space. He talks about you don't

**[18:39]** want to be memorable until it's time to be memorable, but you also don't want to be forgotten

**[18:43]** when it's time to be remembered. And so you need to know that in the sales process. And on your

**[18:47]** first conversation in a cold call, it's okay to be unmemorable, right? Because if someone answers,

**[18:52]** they have the propensity to answer a call. You're likely to talk to them again, at least in the next

**[18:56]** five or six styles. And so don't feel the need to rush into and force a meeting. It's take what you

**[19:03]** can get from the conversation, disposition it correctly. So you know what you're doing next

**[19:06]** time you call that person have good notes that you take notes are not connected with Anthony,

**[19:11]** not interested on a note. So what, what did I get? Well, I wasn't interested. I was a sentiment,

**[19:18]** whatever. And then you can leverage that in your next conversation. Anthony, we talked three months

**[19:24]** ago, it was probably like the worst time I could have called you. But we talked about was boom,

**[19:28]** boom, boom. They're gonna be like, Oh, yeah, I don't remember that. But yeah, go ahead.

**[19:32]** Because you're not memorable. You don't need to be. And so just keep chipping away at these

**[19:35]** conversations. Eventually, you'll have an open we had a, actually, yesterday, we booked a meeting

**[19:40]** with a big named account. And if you look at the call logs, we had nine conversations with this

**[19:45]** person. We were told to f off three of those nine. We were told not interested six of the

**[19:51]** the other six. And then finally, you catch them at the right time, you have enough context, you've

**[19:55]** built enough signals around the account or from previous conversations, whereas like, you know

**[19:58]** what, actually, this does sound interesting. At that point, you are memorable, right? You've had

**[20:02]** nine conversations. Makes a ton of sense. Any other non obvious things in the list building in the

## 20:09 — The list is the strategy — don't trust your data provider

**[20:09]** follow up that people are just doing wrong? It lists what we talked about is the list is

**[20:16]** the strategy, right? The ceiling of your outbound efforts is always going to be the quality of your

**[20:22]** list. And I don't mean quality of the list, like I have good data for them, meaning I have the right

**[20:27]** phone number. That is certainly a piece of it. But it's a subcategory underneath the targeting

**[20:32]** itself. You know, the challenge that we ran into, and again, back to what you said earlier about

**[20:36]** 2020, and some of these is back to 2011, when you had predictable revenue come out by Aaron Ross,

**[20:42]** who came out of Salesforce and had a nice, a nice time there and wrote a book about it.

**[20:47]** That was like the deterioration of outbound was around that time. Because we fractionalize what

**[20:53]** used to be a full cycle account executive role, which is like a very intentional, very smooth,

**[20:59]** very like cohesive relationship you're building with your prospect, there's continuity there.

**[21:04]** And predictable revenue came out and basically said, no, let's fractionalize and specialize.

**[21:08]** Let's have, you know, a ease who used to open, you know, do their own prospecting, build their own

**[21:12]** list, would then go into they do their own hunting, they would do the own, they're, they're

**[21:17]** gathering, if you will, and they would nurture deals, they close and they'd even do retention

**[21:21]** and upsells and account management. And nowadays, it's like you have an SDR, you have an AE, you

**[21:27]** might even have a sales engineer, you probably have account managers and CX employees, you

**[21:31]** fractionize is one role into like five. And so you lose stuff there. But nonetheless, when you create

**[21:37]** all these different roles, you then have to create enablement for each of these roles. And one of the

**[21:42]** enablements that has come out of the 20 teens into the 2020s is the accessibility of data.

**[21:49]** There's, you know, it started off with discover or which then became zoom info, it then became like

**[21:54]** Apollo, and then it now it's like the clays of the world and some of these other CLI tools.

**[21:59]** And what we did was we commoditized data so much, and these databases are filled with hundreds of

**[22:04]** millions of contacts that we now and it's so accessible for us, that we now trust those

**[22:09]** systems to build us the list based off a very simple query. And they don't. And so to your

**[22:15]** question, the non obvious thing is don't trust your data provider, use them leverage them.

**[22:20]** However, there needs to be a process in play, where you cannot trust what comes out of there,

**[22:26]** it has to go through a quality assurance check before it gets to the floor, because your ceiling

**[22:30]** is going to be how quality that list is, if I'm targeting the wrong titles, then I can have all

**[22:34]** the conversation in the world, but it's useless. If I'm targeting the right titles of the wrong

**[22:37]** accounts, then it's useless. And so I think that's where people really fail and outbound is they

**[22:42]** they fail at the very, very what we call the above the funnel work, which is list building and

## 22:48 — AI dossiers vs. what people actually tell you

**[22:48]** messaging and things of that nature. Yeah, I think the research has gotten pretty lazy,

**[22:53]** especially with AI thrown into the mix, too, because it looks so confident on paper, too,

**[23:00]** if I as an example, if I'm going to do a brief before a sales call, and I'm going to ask it to

**[23:06]** research the company, research the person, it's going to bring in all these things. And if I just

**[23:11]** take it at face value, there's going to be something that I come to that call with that is

**[23:14]** completely not relevant or just wrong. And I think that laziness has shown up like signal data is very

**[23:21]** interesting. In theory, it sounds great, you know, six cents came out and was like, oh, buyer intent,

**[23:26]** and then they came out recently like, well, and they've had a tough couple of years. But,

**[23:34]** you know, we ran a side by side test of let's go gather all the signals that we think are important

**[23:39]** from these third party signal tools for accounts we want to get into. And we built these dossiers

**[23:44]** of what AI and what these platforms tell us. And then we simultaneously ran that same the same

**[23:50]** accounts through a phone led motion where it's like, hey, our team is going to go talk to people

**[23:55]** up and down the org chart, not for the purpose of booking meetings, but for the purpose of

**[23:58]** conversations and getting Intel. And the signals are not only richer. When you have the conversations,

**[24:05]** like the insights and the alpha, if you're familiar with like the cryptocurrency finance

**[24:09]** term of getting alpha, the alpha you can get from those conversations is substantially richer and

**[24:14]** more valuable. But you also find out that a lot of the AI stuff is inaccurate entirely.

**[24:20]** Because you hear it from the people in the org that are telling you. And so, you know,

**[24:24]** AI is going to tell you that this person in this department, because they have this title,

**[24:28]** is probably decision maker. Well, you talked a little Jimmy over here, and Jim is like, oh,

**[24:31]** no, it's actually Sally who's over here. And you're like, what? They're nowhere in this dossier that

**[24:35]** we've had AI build. Or it's like, okay, they say they have 50 sales reps with AI. And you talk to

**[24:41]** them like, no, we have 19. You know, okay, well, that I bucket you differently, though. So I think

**[24:47]** that's where we just can't trust a lot of these things. And we have to verify. Yeah, you still

## 24:52 — Infantry to special forces: rebuilding the SDR org

**[24:52]** have to talk to people. I'm curious, operationally, because there is a big move from the fractional

**[24:59]** ized roles to full cycle AEs. Who, who do you put the responsibility on to do the outbound?

**[25:09]** And what does it look like? So if you have a full cycle AEs, what percentage of their day

**[25:14]** typically should they be spending, doing this, focused on this? And is there still a world where

**[25:20]** you have SDR teams? And then last one, I'm stacking questions here. But then how do you,

**[25:26]** if you're looking for intelligence, do you do anything different with the comp model if you

**[25:29]** have an SDR team too? Yeah, I'm about to just, I'm gonna machine gun a bunch of stuff to you,

**[25:35]** because this is something I think about. So where we have gone in the market is we're gonna go scale

**[25:41]** headcount, right? And namely in the SDR function. This is largely due to stimulus money in 2020,

**[25:47]** 2021 from the government, create a bunch of fake money in the market and interest rates are next

**[25:52]** to zero. So a bunch of money went into growth and go to market and go and capture demand and

**[25:56]** go capture market share. Well, naturally that flowed itself into the SDR budget. We built this

**[26:01]** massive orgs of SDRs. And so we went down this path of basically accepting extreme mediocrity at best

**[26:10]** by scaling headcount. And people have gotten a lot smarter. And I sit in some of these,

**[26:15]** you know, board meetings with these large private equity groups, I sit in with their like CRO and

**[26:19]** residents and I sit in with their value creation team. And it's super common where it's like,

**[26:23]** I just don't think that the SDR has a place in the future, to which I say the current SDR doesn't,

**[26:30]** I agree. And the number of SDRs that are currently in the market, I would also agree should be cut

**[26:38]** down to at least half if not more. So I'll try to answer the questions, probably not in order. But

**[26:44]** what I'll say is where, where I think the market is going is we're moving from an infantry model

**[26:48]** to a special forces model, which is historically we've gotten away with an infantry, right? It's

**[26:54]** like go hire anybody, never they can enlist in the SDR role. We're going to pay them 60 grand,

**[26:58]** 70 grand a year. Maybe they make 90 grand after OT. To where we're no, it's like, no, we're going

**[27:03]** to have a team that's half or a quarter of the size, but we're going to pay them a lot more

**[27:08]** because they're special. They're like true specialists. They're conversationalists. They're

**[27:12]** really, really good. They're going to make more money in this role than they could have made

**[27:16]** anywhere else. And they're going to be far more effective and stay around longer because they're

**[27:19]** more effective. And we're heavily invested in them. So that's one thing is I think that we're

**[27:23]** moving in this direction of SDRs being a volume play to SDRs being a more strategic special forces.

**[27:29]** I want smaller teams that are far more potent. I don't want to do the whole Pareto principle

**[27:33]** where I have 50 reps and only 10 of them are worth a damn. You know, I want to have eight

**[27:38]** and I want those eight to all be potent. Yes, there'll be a Pareto somewhere in there,

**[27:42]** but the disparity is not that big. But they're all highly effective and very profitable.

**[27:47]** So that's one thing. The second thing is I think full cycle AEs should have never left the market.

**[27:52]** Like if you look mathematically or if you look from a metrics perspective at a funnel,

**[27:57]** the SDR is always going to have a lower meeting rate. They're going to have a lower show rate.

**[28:01]** They're going to have a lower qualified opportunity rate. And they're likely it's going to be on par

**[28:06]** with maybe slightly lower win rate. So yes, they can do more volume of setting more meetings,

**[28:11]** but their meeting rates can be lower. So that requires more volume, less they're going to show

**[28:14]** up lesser to be qualified, less they're going to close. If you look at the AE, they can make a

**[28:19]** fraction of the dials and have two, three times the meeting rate. They can have a 15, 20 point

**[28:24]** higher meeting show rate. They can have a 20, 30 point higher qualification rate because they're

**[28:29]** more selective of who they put on their calendar. And then naturally their win rates higher because

**[28:33]** they there's continuity throughout this whole process. So my view is that it should have never

**[28:38]** left. It's more effective, even at the substantially less volume. And where I think that the world

**[28:43]** should move to, and where I'm starting to see glimmers of this, and I've been running this play

**[28:47]** for 10 years, is the SDR's job is not to book meetings, just to book commerce, it's to have

**[28:52]** conversations. Will meetings come from that naturally? But what about the rest? There should

**[28:57]** be categories of conversations that we're cataloging, we call these dispositions or call

**[29:01]** outcomes, where there's a subset of the conversation. So think of conversations as a subset of the

**[29:08]** total contacts that I went after. And then think of subsets of those conversations as being highly

**[29:13]** valuable, not on calendar people, right? So I might have a conversation with Anthony. We have a six

**[29:17]** minute conversation. He's not ready to take a meeting with a random stranger yet, but we had

**[29:21]** a great conversation, great insight, great intel. Should that stay in the camp of the SDR's

**[29:25]** responsibility? Or should it go to the AE who's far more likely to have a better conversation

**[29:29]** with that person? It should go over there. And so because the AE can't do as much activity,

**[29:34]** you should narrow down the pool of people they go after, so that they can go be as lethal as

**[29:38]** possible in that seat instead of keeping in the SDR's camp. So I think it's the shared responsibility

**[29:44]** of they both need to be doing it. I still think full cycle AE should go cold to a larger list,

**[29:48]** but I think they should hyper focus on this subset list that the SDR's are surfacing conversations

**[29:53]** on. And I think the unification of those two plays is where the market has to move to,

## 29:58 — The MDR: an SDR who isn't allowed to book meetings

**[29:58]** if you want us to be effective and profitable. And there's a third variation of this that I'm,

**[30:03]** I've been playing with for about two years now called the MDR. It's the market development rep.

**[30:08]** Let's hear it. So this is my favorite team. This is my biggest team, actually, in my company.

**[30:12]** The MDR's role is to be an SDR. That's not a lot of book meetings.

**[30:16]** Full style. So that's a hard, hard rule. Not a lot of book. Yep. So the MDR's role,

**[30:21]** it's a marketing development rep. Their job is twofold. One is to do inbound intercepting.

**[30:27]** They can book on those because those are inbound, but they intercepts form fills, opt-ins, content,

**[30:32]** people that are on the website, et cetera. But predominantly their job is to go what we call

**[30:37]** below the line inside of accounts that we want to break into. So let's just say let's just break an

**[30:41]** account. I want to break into Zoom info. And Zoom info is a massive organization. Yes, there's a

**[30:49]** handful of decision makers at the top, like James and Henry and Molly and some of these folks.

**[30:55]** But the MDR's job is to go and talk to the directors, the managers, the AEs, the SDRs for us.

**[31:02]** Can't book a meeting? I just want you to have a conversation. I want you to go gather as much

**[31:06]** insight and intel as possible to then go feed a true dossier, like we talked about before,

**[31:10]** the AI dossier versus the conversation one. And that dossier needs to get fed directly to the AE.

**[31:17]** And so you have SDRs that do book meetings and have good conversations that pass to the AE.

**[31:21]** You have the MDR that only has conversations and they pass these super valuable dossiers and intel

**[31:25]** gather. We call it IGs. These IG reports to the AEs so that when the AE does go up to Henry or

**[31:31]** James or Molly or any of these folks, they're now equipped with all this alpha signal from

**[31:36]** down below. Like imagine I called you at the org. I said, hey, Anthony. Anthony Joe Gilkey at Tynax.

**[31:41]** You and I haven't talked before. This is going to feel very random, but I've actually talked to 13

**[31:46]** people at Zoom info in the past week. And I found out some super interesting facts. Do you have a

**[31:51]** minute for me to kind of share some things I think would be interesting to you? Yeah, sure. Cool.

**[31:56]** And then boom. Hey, we talked to a VP. He said this. We talked to a director. He said that we

**[32:00]** talked to three SDRs. They had the same thread to the conversation that said this. It sounds like

**[32:05]** this problem is starting to bubble up in the org. Is that something that's on your radar?

**[32:09]** Like how is that conversation going to go? Except, yeah. And so I, you know, to wrap this in a bow,

**[32:17]** I think there's MDRs that only have conversations and they build Intel gathered reports. You have

**[32:21]** SDRs that are a little more senior. By the way, I arbitrage that MDR role. They're all in South

**[32:27]** Africa. Good accents, super well educated, very talented people cost you 35 grand. SDR, for me,

**[32:36]** U.S. based $120,000 base salary, which is way above market rates. So I get the best talent

**[32:42]** and the AEs are on top of them. And so I think there's MDRs, there's SDRs, there's AEs

**[32:46]** in a pod structure. And the conversation is kind of the nucleus, if you will.

**[32:52]** One-to-one ratios between those roles or does it matter depending on

**[32:56]** ACD? It matters based off of conversation volume. So I am very in a very fortunate position. I have

**[33:02]** infinite access to my own tool, which means that, you know, when the market, the typical market's

**[33:07]** getting three, four, 5% connect rates, we get 25. So I'm arming every employee. I basically turn

**[33:12]** them into a super employee where they all have 25% connect, which means mathematically they're

**[33:16]** talking to someone every four dials versus 30 dials. So they can make $60 in a day, but they

**[33:22]** can have 12, 15 conversations. I can do a lot with that versus they can make $100 a day and have three.

**[33:29]** And so we call them like super SDRs or super MDRs where it's like I can take one rep that has the

**[33:36]** same capacity as someone else over here, someone else's org that has a 3% connect rate and they can

**[33:40]** do five times the work in the same amount of activity. And so we just arm them with this

**[33:46]** ability to talk to more people and therefore they can then, one SDR can handle three AEs, four AEs.

**[33:51]** You can have a MDR team of six that is doing the entire book of business Intel gathering.

**[33:58]** And so it's, it's pretty powerful when you compound it together.

**[34:02]** Yeah. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is that leverage, if you just get

**[34:08]** a handful of conversion rate points increase, it could mean millions of dollars, tens of millions

**[34:15]** at scale. So every little bit of intelligence you can get from those conversations, empowering the

**[34:20]** AE with the right strategy, and then they can be the special forces person to go in and figure out

## 34:25 — The reach rate: why you'll only ever reach 200 of 1,000

**[34:25]** how to, how to use that. Highly, highly effective. Yeah. I would love to hear tight necks. How

**[34:35]** technically, how are you helping teams get higher connect rates, helping them operationalize this

**[34:42]** whole part of their business? Yep. I will start this with Anthony. Do you answer cold calls yourself?

**[34:49]** I do not. Okay. And if I called you five times over the next two months, because Anthony,

**[34:54]** I've determined as a rep, you're important to me. Am I going to change the fact that you don't

**[34:58]** want to answer cold calls? I think there's a handful of times where I have. So sparingly.

**[35:06]** Yeah. So what we just saw was an example of human behavior, right? I do answer cold calls.

**[35:12]** I'm a psycho and I guess I like doing that, but most of the people in the market would answer the

**[35:17]** question. No. And the funny thing is every prospect we have has an answer to that question. You just

**[35:21]** don't know the answer. So we have to start with that basis. Tight necks is founded on this idea

**[35:26]** of what we call the reach rate. So the reach rate is a very simply explained metric that nobody

**[35:30]** measures. Um, or if they do, they call something else. They don't pay attention to it, which is

**[35:35]** if I have a thousand prospects out of those thousand people, if I just call through that

**[35:39]** list of a thousand over and over and over again, seven, eight, nine times all the way through,

**[35:43]** pull people out as I talk to them and I just call the remaining and I just keep calling and keep

**[35:46]** calling the number of the thousand I will ever get ahold of is usually never going to excite exceed

**[35:51]** 200. So mathematically speaking, if I have a thousand prospects and let's say I have a 4%

**[35:56]** connect rate, if I called those thousand people over and over and over again on a diminishing

**[36:01]** rounds equation, which is I call a thousand, I talked to 44%. Um, I call the remaining nine 60,

**[36:08]** I talked to 36 or whatever it is. If I do that through seven rounds, I will have probably reached

**[36:13]** about the 200, but it would have taken me about 7,200 aisles to do it. So 7,000 dials to talk to

**[36:20]** 200 people. So Tynex is built on this idea that there is human behavior in all of us and that

**[36:26]** human behavior dictates whether or not we answer, we might answer, or we don't answer a cold call.

**[36:32]** Morbid curiosity is the role you're in. It's the season you're in, whatever.

**[36:37]** The challenge that presents the teams is if 80% are unlikely to answer and 20% are ever,

**[36:43]** and I don't know the answers to that question, what do I have to do as a rep? I have to treat

**[36:47]** every single prospect the same because I don't know the answer. Anthony might answer, so I'm

**[36:51]** gonna have to call him. First is Tynex, the data that we've built a model around is, is knowing who

**[36:57]** are those 200 people that would have answered if you would have just called this list over and over

**[37:01]** again. I know who they are before you hit dial. We use the analogy, super cheesy, but we use the

**[37:05]** analogy of Neils in a haystack. You go to zoom info or Cognizum or Apollo or clay and you build a list

**[37:10]** of a thousand people. That's a haystack. Every straw of hay is a contact with data attached to it.

**[37:15]** My rep's job today is to sift through hay all day through dialing. Usually if they have a 4%

**[37:22]** connect rate, they're going to sift through 24 straws of hay to finally pick up the one needle.

**[37:25]** It's highly inefficient. It's very expensive. What Tynex essentially is, is where this cheesy

**[37:30]** magnet, said it was cheesy, that goes in there and we pull out the 200 of those thousand

**[37:35]** off the jump. And so now I can say, great, all 1000 are still important to me, but I would never

**[37:40]** reach these 800. So I'm going to focus my phone efforts on these 200 because I would have gotten

**[37:44]** them eventually. Why not get them right now and get them extremely efficiently. And every four dials

**[37:48]** talk to one of them. And so that's what Tynex built was this, this model arounds analyzing

**[37:54]** a metric ton of data, um, looking at telecom and carrier data, consumer data, professional data,

**[37:58]** and we're triangulated to answer three questions. One is, is Anthony's phone number? Yes or no.

**[38:02]** Data providers don't get it right all the time. In fact, they're wrong like 15 to 20% of the time.

**[38:07]** Two is, is this an active number for Anthony, right? Is this one that is actively being

**[38:11]** receiving and giving calls? And the third is when phone numbers call this phone number that we've

**[38:17]** now attached to Anthony, when phone numbers call this phone number, what is the, what is the

**[38:22]** propensity or the activity level against a phone number that does not commonly call this phone

**[38:26]** number you can assume is a cold call. And from there, we take all these sources, we pulled into

**[38:31]** a lake, we then say, great, run the model against it and say, we know yeses. It's a yes to all three

**[38:36]** of these questions. Anthony's high intent for the phone. Or it's yes for the first two. We know it's

**[38:41]** his, we know it's active. He doesn't answer. It's low intent for the phone. Or it's a no, it's not

**[38:46]** Anthony's number. It's bad data. You can't even call that number because even if someone answers

**[38:49]** it, it's, we call it Anthony and someone in jail answers. So that's the model we built. That's the

**[38:54]** technology behind it is we know who's likely to answer the phone before you picked out or you hit

## 38:58 — Voicemail, AI screeners, and burning your shot

**[38:58]** dial. Do you have an opinion? I'm going to be a data point of one. So I don't know if this is

**[39:06]** common behavior. When I do get calls, I do actually listen to or read because it will

**[39:15]** transcribe them on my iPhone. I will read every message that somebody leaves me. Do you commonly

**[39:21]** leave messages? Do you avoid leaving messages? What's your, what's your thought on that?

**[39:26]** So when we run a model and we say, hey, thousand prospects, here's the 200. They're high intent.

**[39:32]** They're high intent regardless of whether they have their AI screener on or whatever.

**[39:39]** That hasn't changed their behavior, actually. The AI screener has not changed connect rates,

**[39:44]** believe it or not. People think it has. The second is, okay, if they're high intent, we're going to

**[39:48]** keep calling them. If they're low intent, we're still going to call them because the definition

**[39:51]** is it's low intent. It doesn't mean no. It doesn't mean they won't answer in 50 dials. It just means

**[39:56]** that they're low intent to answer. So to your question, do I leave messages and stuff? If it's

**[40:02]** AI screening, you leave a message on high intent regardless. If it's low intent, you leave a message

**[40:06]** regardless. I don't leave voicemails on high intent because I know I'm going to get them eventually.

**[40:11]** Mathematically speaking, I will reach Anthony in the next seven dials. 85% chance. If they're high

**[40:17]** intent, if they're low intent, it's super unlikely they're ever going to answer. And so I want to give

**[40:21]** as much surface area to get them to answer as possible. So there is, like, I really want to

**[40:25]** care about the AI screening. I really want to care about the voicemail I leave. I really want to care

**[40:28]** about the voicemail pointing to the email I sent them because my probability of giving them a phone

**[40:32]** is very low. And so you'll notice this. You're low intent. You have the AI screener on. The people

**[40:39]** who are adopting AI screening the most are the people who were never going to answer in the first

**[40:43]** place. So it's actually a benefit to you because now you have a new ad channel which shows up on

**[40:47]** here, which is a new ad, a pop-up, you know, called a push notification, right, that you never

**[40:56]** had that real estate before. So now you have the real estate to maybe turn someone who's low intent

**[41:00]** and wouldn't have answered a blank cold call with no context and now seeing a message they might now

**[41:04]** answer. And so that's how we look at that is you have to, you know, we talk to people who say this

**[41:11]** all the time, prospect to people the way they like to be prospected to. Like, let me answer the phone.

**[41:16]** Just keep calling them. They'll answer. If they don't leave voicemails, do the AI screening, shoot

**[41:21]** the emails, point to that in your in your voicemails and so on. So that would melt long-winded answer to

**[41:26]** that. No, I think one of the nuances there, a lot of people, you may be burning your shot with that

**[41:32]** high intent person because if you leave a message, then you're only gonna be able to leave so much

**[41:39]** context. You're not gonna get the back and forth. But then you kind of burned your chance at having

**[41:43]** a real conversation with that person. Yeah. So I think the ability to shift your strategy with

**[41:50]** that intelligence is huge. Yeah, and something we built end of last year and we're really doubling

**[41:56]** down on with our new platform launch in about a month and a half is we know who has AI turned on.

**[42:05]** So now we're gonna have a subcategory of subcategories where it's like, hey, they're

**[42:08]** high intent, no AI, they're high intent AI. So therefore, you know, we're building a platform

**[42:14]** now where we can actually have you have scripting or messaging in front of you of like, hey, when

**[42:18]** I run this high intent AI campaign, this is what I say. So I can start testing what works to give

**[42:23]** me three eye screeners. And the same thing goes for low intent. They're low intent without AI

**[42:28]** screening on, they're probably never gonna answer. They're low intent with AI screening. I have a

**[42:31]** shot by dropping something with AI screening. So an AI screening is very different than voicemail,

**[42:36]** right? You definitely don't want to leave a voicemail with high intent, because you will

**[42:41]** probably blow your shot more than likely. Because people people recognize phone numbers more than

**[42:45]** they recognize a conversation out the gate. It's just a weird thing. Like, remembering a name

**[42:50]** amongst a bunch of words you said is harder than just constantly seeing the same four digits come

**[42:55]** through. And if you leave a voicemail, and I saw it's a salesperson, and I saw it's a 4886

**[43:00]** last four, I'm just not answering 4886 in the future. So at that point, then you got to like

**[43:04]** call on different numbers. And that's a whole other technical game you got to play. So I'd rather

**[43:09]** just not burn that conversation. Yeah, and these are all of the I'm sure you have a list of a

**[43:15]** million other techniques and things to get this really dialed in. But these are all the things

**[43:20]** that I know teams are not doing. And then they're saying phone doesn't work. Correct. And they're

**[43:26]** not even trying or even doing the fundamentals right. Yeah, I mean, I was just on with you

## 43:35 — Outbound is not dying — but yours is

**[43:35]** mentioned the intro, but updated partners is who invested in us back in January. And I read a

**[43:41]** webinar for their portfolio, a lot of CROs and their VPs of sales and stuff. And the title of

**[43:49]** the webinar was guaranteeing outbound sales success. And the whole thing was like, I know that's a bold

**[43:54]** statement. But I've done this for almost a decade and 1.75 decades this one come up on two decades

**[44:02]** here. And I've never lost it outbound. And so therefore I can with conviction and a backbone

**[44:08]** say that you can guarantee and I've done them in many different types of companies, some with

**[44:12]** product market fit, some without it, some in really hard markets, some in easier markets,

**[44:16]** you can get up on to work if you just know what goes into that. And just most people just don't

**[44:21]** know what goes into it. And then if they do know what goes into it, they don't know how to measure

**[44:25]** against it and actually run this, this continuous game of improvement. Outbound is very similar to

**[44:31]** like a PLG motion in the sense that it's a constant experimentation. Look at the data.

**[44:35]** What's it tell me? Red work better. Placement here work better. Right. This, this list work better.

**[44:41]** This messaging work better. This rep is actually delivering this message this way. We should train

**[44:45]** the other reps to do that. When we do this type of follow up after this type of conversation,

**[44:49]** we get this type of outcome. It's a game of constant experimentation, iteration. And if you

**[44:53]** know how to run those experiments and you know which containers to run them in on list and message

**[44:58]** and rep and follow up, you can guarantee the success. And so I'll tie that above with what I

**[45:02]** told this group was outbound is not dying, but yours is. And then I have to walk them through.

**[45:09]** Why is that? Right. It's not that outbound is wrong or that SDR motion is wrong or full cycle

**[45:14]** is better than SDR and all these things. It's that the way that you're doing it today is what is wrong.

## 45:20 — Where AI belongs: the restaurant analogy

**[45:20]** Well, and I think what a lot of people have done, they've loaded up their AI cannon and

**[45:26]** spam their entire TAM and market. I know you have a lot of strong opinions on how AI should be used

**[45:33]** in, in GTM. Where do you think it fits with the focus on phone and conversations and just outbound

**[45:41]** in general? Well, fortunately, AI is not conversationally ready yet. Latency is there. You can tell it's AI.

**[45:50]** Even the best of AI you can tell. For sure. And then also on that note, though, even

**[45:58]** let's assume it was conversationally there. I do still think there's a difference between

**[46:03]** connecting with someone and knowing that it's trust on the other side. It's trust. You know,

**[46:07]** I think you and I talked about this before is outbound or excuse me, even sales in general,

**[46:13]** and outbound being a subcategory of sales. It's a transaction between two people or two parties

**[46:19]** based on trust. And so there's different types of trust. There's like trust you to get me the

**[46:24]** right answer I want and trusting you inherently with helping guide this conversation and us trying

**[46:28]** to collectively solve this problem that you have and I can solve for you. I think it's a big piece

**[46:33]** of it. And I think with AI, like, even with like my script right there, it's really it's gonna be

**[46:40]** really difficult for AI to emote what a human can emote perfectly. And I do think there's something

**[46:47]** I'm not a big woo guy at all. Like, you know, very traditional, you know, Christian type of

**[46:53]** background, but there's something to like, energy, AI doesn't have energy, like humanity does. And

**[47:00]** there's something about sensing someone's energy and donation and what they're saying and why

**[47:05]** they're saying it when they say it, that you're not going to be able to, to replicate. And I think

**[47:11]** that if we take that out of sales, specifically, but a lot of go to market, then I think that we're

**[47:15]** going to miss out on a lot of abilities to build trust and trust leads to transactions. That's just

**[47:21]** my two cents on them on the whole thing. But I have a much larger one we talked about around my

**[47:25]** analogy. But no, I'd love to get into that. I think the analogy you shared on our prep call

**[47:32]** has been stuck in my head since that conversation. And I think it's framed how I think about

**[47:38]** leveraging AI and go to market so much. Yeah. So how do I view AI and where does it live?

**[47:45]** And I give the story of there's a restaurant in San Diego that my wife and I adore. And we go to

**[47:51]** it every time we met in San Diego. And every time we go back, which is usually a couple of times a

**[47:55]** year, we go to this restaurant. It's called Born and Raised. It's in little Italy district in San

**[48:01]** Diego. And it's you go in and it's great Gatsby vibes, right? It's gold and mahogany. And you go

**[48:09]** in and everyone's wearing tuxes. Like all the waiters and waitresses are dressed to the nines.

**[48:15]** And then you sit down on these beautiful tables and the vibes are great. And you sit down and the

**[48:21]** service and the experience that the people give you is pretty incredible, which is, you know,

**[48:25]** they have cocktail bars, they mix, they do like, what do they call it? Mixology in front of you.

**[48:32]** They have conversations. If you go up and go to the bathroom, you come back,

**[48:35]** your drinks filled, your napkins folded, or you have a new napkin. You have new silverware.

**[48:39]** It's perfect. You know, if you want dessert, they will have this ice cream thing where like

**[48:44]** nitrous nitrous oxide or whatever they call it is like this fog is flowing on the table as they

**[48:48]** mix this ice cream in front of you. It's like this incredible experience. And you're like, okay,

**[48:51]** for two people, I'm, I'm super happy to pay 450 bucks for the night. Because the food is great,

**[48:57]** but the experience is what I care about. And so the analogy I use for AI is if I was to go back to

**[49:02]** that restaurant and you were to tell me that everything in the back of the house in the

**[49:07]** kitchen was fully automated, stakes were made, same quality, fully automated, etc. I wouldn't care,

**[49:16]** because I'm there for the experience on the front of the house. But if you told me that they're not

**[49:21]** doing waiters anymore, and you order on an iPad, and it's faster, though, and I can be in and out

**[49:27]** quicker, or I can get what I want with the click of a button, etc, but I miss this like human energy

**[49:31]** and all this things that come with it, then I'll never come back ever again. Right. And so I use

**[49:38]** that with AI, because I think that there is that what we call front of front of house AI in back of

**[49:42]** house. And I use the same analogy five years ago, when it was front of house automation and back of

**[49:46]** house automation, when AI wasn't really a thing yet. And so when it comes to sales, there are things

**[49:52]** in the front of the house, you just can't remove the human from less you ruin the experience or

**[49:57]** lessen the experience, whether you don't gather trust, or you don't build the relationship and so

**[50:02]** on, that we're just not gonna be able to get rid of. And that's the conversations. It's things

**[50:06]** that actually interface and touch the public market, your whether it's your customers, your prospects,

**[50:11]** your market in general. If AI is doing all of it, I think you're gonna lose this experience in the

**[50:16]** front end. That is what makes it special. That said, it's incredibly powerful and high leverage

**[50:21]** to have it in the back of the house, right? The CRM high, the things that take me away from the

**[50:26]** front of house. Like imagine if I went to born and raised and the guy who was the waiter who gave me

**[50:30]** great experience also had to go spend his time in the back cooking the steak. I would lose time with

**[50:34]** him and I'd lose this everything. So how do we get him in the front of the house more for the

**[50:38]** experience and create better experiences by automating stuff in the back of the house?

**[50:42]** Right? So it's CRM hygiene. It's the conversational intelligence. It's identifying signals that came

**[50:47]** from the conversations. It's quality assurance on your list. It's all these things that you can have

**[50:52]** in the back of the house that's administrative, that's very repeatable and process driven,

**[50:57]** has strict guardrails and rules. Go to town, right? Like figure out how to have AI in the

**[51:03]** back of the house to remove. If it can have a relatively similar efficacy as effective and you

**[51:09]** can make it more efficient, then that's margin and that's leverage. It's just, if you want that to

**[51:14]** creep its way into the front of the house, I think you're gonna have some degradation to your funnel

**[51:18]** that you don't want. Yeah, the metaphor speaks to me on a lot of levels. One, running a services

**[51:26]** business. I know how important the human interaction is with our clients and how important that part

**[51:32]** is. I spent six years in a restaurant and I did every front of house position you could think of.

## 51:38 — What can't be automated out of the front of house

**[51:38]** Busboy to bartender and I agree. I'm curious. What's the essence of that though? What is

**[51:48]** there that cannot be replaced, that cannot be mechanized by AI? And if you were to put it into

**[51:57]** a few words, what's in that front of house experience that has to be human?

**[52:03]** If you and I had this podcast right now and I was able to give you all the same answers,

**[52:08]** would we have the same conversation and connection? If you ask me, every question you've asked me and

**[52:14]** my AI avatar could give you the exact same answers, would you feel differently about this

**[52:19]** conversation than you and I have in this conversation right now? 100%. Yeah. So it

**[52:25]** can be transactional. It can get you an outcome and get you an answer. AI can be very transactional

**[52:32]** in nature and can get you answers faster, but there's an element of trust that I think only

**[52:38]** comes through human connection. All right, there's different types of trust, but there's this human

**[52:42]** connection trust where, you know, oftentimes when I'm deep into procurement with trying to buy

**[52:48]** something for tight necks, it's silly to think that you could put any sales rep that says the

**[52:55]** same thing to me as the sales rep that I've grown affinity towards and it's going to get the deal

**[53:01]** done the same way, if at all. And so I think the same thing with the AI is AI can replicate all

**[53:06]** the right answers, maybe even give better answers in some ways, but you lose this interaction that

**[53:11]** I think is inherently human that you're just, it's never going to replace. If it does, we're in

**[53:18]** trouble. I mean, let's be honest. Where I think this whole thing falls apart is when you're an AI

**[53:24]** and I'm an AI in the sales process and you fully trust the AI to be autonomous to buy for your

**[53:30]** company and I fully trust the AI to autonomously sell for my company and all they do is interact.

**[53:36]** Okay, we're in trouble. But so long as there's a human element on either side of the party,

**[53:42]** of the aisle and in a transaction, I think that there needs to be a jersey matching of humanity

**[53:48]** there. I think that's the essence. Is there something there that I don't even know how to

**[53:52]** explain outside of we're all created beings and there's something between knowing that you're a

**[54:00]** dad or a husband or a wife or a mother or a sister or a brother and you have hobbies that are outside

**[54:05]** of your title that you wear at work, the jersey you walk into the office with. Knowing that about

**[54:13]** someone is, it's unique. It's part of the unique human experience that I don't think you can

**[54:19]** necessarily automate out. At least in like B2B, higher transaction stuff, do I think AI is

**[54:25]** touching PLG and more consumer-based? Of course, because it's a very transactional sale. But if

**[54:32]** you get into a sale that has any level of complexity or any level of value or expense to it or cost,

**[54:38]** I think that the larger the transaction, the more complex the transaction, the more trust is required.

## 54:45 — Effort, efficiency, effectiveness: why more volume backfires

**[54:45]** Really, really well said. I think a lot of people are getting obsessed with

**[54:51]** just getting every bit of efficiency out of their system. I think there's two ways. There's

**[54:56]** effectiveness that you can get with AI power and then there's efficiency, which really has

**[55:04]** a diminishing return at a certain point. But how do you think about that and where do you think

**[55:08]** it's going to be going in the future? Yeah, I think that what we have seen from the 20-teens

**[55:15]** to the 2020s is a massive move towards because things have become less effective. Headwinds have

**[55:21]** entered the market. With email, it's blacklisting domains. With LinkedIn, it's throttling how many

**[55:26]** connections you can send. With phone, it's spam carriers, spamming phone numbers and saying spam

**[55:31]** likely. Where there is an increase or a decrease in effectiveness, people tend to then try to solve

**[55:37]** that with effort. There's effort, there's efficiency, and there's effectiveness. It's the

**[55:44]** 3Es. They've tried to up the volume. If I used to get these results on 100 dials, for example,

**[55:54]** and now I'm getting half those results on the same amount of dials, then naturally, if I want

**[55:57]** to get back to where I was, I need to make double the amount of dials to get back to where I was or

**[56:01]** triple if I want to get past that. The challenge with that is when you increase the volume,

## 56:07 — The 30x case study: 200,000 dials vs. 8,000

**[56:07]** you increase the friction and the resistance as well. I have a case study. We just ran this with

**[56:13]** a customer of ours that they came and piloted us a year ago. I said, "Hey, if you continue to know

**[56:18]** this path, here's what's going to happen." They didn't believe me, naturally. I told you so,

**[56:24]** guy, I'm just going to show you the data. They ended up going for 11 months straight,

**[56:28]** running the same path they were running. They came back to me like, "You were right,

**[56:32]** but we can't pinpoint what was wrong." I was like, "I told you what was wrong. I'll do it again."

**[56:36]** I said, "How about this? Give me your call logs," because they were obsessed with parallel dialing.

**[56:42]** "Give me your call logs for the last 11 months and I will tell you in the next 30

**[56:44]** minutes what's wrong." They have call logs where they made 200,000 dials parallel dialing,

**[56:51]** mass volume. They only made 8,000 dials single line dialing, meaning they did the power

**[56:58]** function, which is one to one dialing, not five to five to five. When I showed them the outcome,

**[57:08]** people got fired. What happened was they got fired because I told them a year ago and they

**[57:13]** would avoid the last year. What happened was they made 20 times the amount of dials, so 200,000

**[57:21]** versus 8,000. What happened in those 200,000 dials was they had an average connector of 2%.

**[57:30]** 2% connect rate on 200,000 dials, 4,000 connects. Their meeting rate was 2%. They had 2% meetings

**[57:40]** on 2% dials on 200,000 dials. I then showed them power, which they had been paying attention to.

**[57:48]** Some reps were starting to do power dialing on the side. They had 8,000 dials attributed.

**[57:52]** So it was 4% the amount of dials. Generated 25% more outcomes. So the 8,000 dials had a

**[58:02]** 9% connect rate, 9.8. So it was almost a 5x difference in connect rate. But here's the

**[58:09]** crazy part, was because parallel dialing creates such a terrible user experience for the person

**[58:12]** answering. Their meeting rate was so low. The meeting rate for power dialing, which was slow,

**[58:18]** 1 to 1, slowest, smooth, smoothest, fast. Their meeting rate was 12% versus 2%.

**[58:24]** So if you combine those two, it's 5 times higher connect rate. So I'm getting 5 times the amount

**[58:28]** of it bats on the same amount of dials. And it was 6 times the amount of a meeting rate. You

**[58:33]** combine those two, it's a 30x difference. So it took 30 times the amount of dials to get the same

## 58:41 — Why parallel dialing breaks: the bridge and the carriers

**[58:41]** outcome parallel dialing as it did just single line dialing. What's happening there? If you could

**[58:47]** break down the Y behind both of those. So a lot of it's the infrastructure behind it. So if you

**[58:53]** parallel dial. Power dialing is simple. I'm placing one call from one phone number to one person.

**[59:00]** Parallel dialing is I'm placing five calls to five people at one time. The person that answers

**[59:04]** wins. Everyone else gets hung up on. So if you think about that experience in the first place,

**[59:11]** one, let's sequentially, here's the bad things that happen. One is I don't know who's about

**[59:16]** the answer of the five. So I'm not prepared. So that's going to hurt my meeting rate regardless.

**[59:21]** Second is there's a mechanical aspect to parallel dialing where if I call five people at a time,

**[59:26]** you have to have some sort of detection of voice of who answers. So let's just say the third person

**[59:32]** on this list of five answers, it has to know the answered. And then it's going to hang up on the

**[59:37]** other four to patch me. It's called a bridge to bridge me into the one that answered. There's a

**[59:42]** delay that I don't know if you ever answered a cold call and you don't hear someone for like two or three seconds.

**[59:47]** I'm thinking I've had that experience. And then I've had somebody calling me that hangs up in like

**[59:52]** two rings. And I was wondering why that was happening. It's multiple. One is they could

**[59:58]** just be spoofing or they could be doing some, see if you answer type of thing for a database. But

**[1:00:03]** the main reason for the long pause is this, it's the mechanical aspect of this bridge. There's a

**[1:00:10]** time delay between knowing who answered, hanging up on the rest and patching you through the one

**[1:00:14]** that did that. It's like, you go, this is Joey. Hello. And then you go, Hey, Joey, you know, like

**[1:00:23]** then someone jumps on to like, it's the worst user experience. So now I've degraded my, my opportunity

**[1:00:28]** to actually have a conversation with this person. Plus you get hung up a lot in that, like I hang

**[1:00:33]** up all the time. If I say hello and there's even a one second pause, I'm done. So I lost my bat

**[1:00:38]** or they lost their bat. So that's the big thing. The biggest contributor to this though,

**[1:00:43]** is telcos and carriers. So AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, all the European ones, all the Australian ones,

**[1:00:49]** heavy in the US. They care about two things, regulation, and they care about user experience.

**[1:00:56]** Just like, it's just like Facebook, right? Or LinkedIn is the algorithm is going to tune to

**[1:01:01]** keep you on the platform and give you the best user experience possible. If they're giving you

**[1:01:05]** terrible ads that make you log off, they had the data to support that, then they're going to stop

**[1:01:10]** doing that. On cold email, Google and Outlook or Google and Microsoft are looking at how much spam

**[1:01:16]** email is coming into my inbox. I hate logging into my email because I have all this spam. Well,

**[1:01:19]** they're going to figure out a way to blacklist domains that are spam. Well, telcos and carriers

**[1:01:23]** are doing the same thing and we're doing it to ourselves. What we hated about email getting done

**[1:01:27]** to us with Google and Outlook. And so AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, they're now sharing data

**[1:01:32]** and they're starting to find who is doing mass telemarketing, who is doing spam, and they have

**[1:01:39]** this whole scoring system of how they, your phone number that you call from out of your dialer

**[1:01:44]** is like a credit score. You either heard it with stuff you do or you help it with stuff you do,

**[1:01:49]** right? Or you heard it with things you don't do or you help it with things you don't do.

**[1:01:54]** And so the biggest thing that's happening is when you do volume, you are shoveling all this data to

**[1:01:58]** the carriers that is basically saying this is spam. Blacklist the number. Blacklist the number.

**[1:02:04]** Blacklist the number. And when that happens, like I guarantee Anthony, you don't like to

**[1:02:08]** answer cold calls, but you say you'll answer them every now and then. If you get spam likely,

**[1:02:12]** what is the odds you answer a spam likely? 0% chance. Right. So there are people who will answer

**[1:02:19]** a clean number, but they won't answer spam, myself included. I will answer a clean number,

**[1:02:23]** I won't answer spam. And so because you're doing all this volume, you are creating a larger wave

**[1:02:30]** that comes at you from telcos and carriers, not to mention all the mechanical and infrastructure

## 01:02:34 — Preparation is the real edge

**[1:02:34]** stuff I mentioned. So that's what happens. It makes a ton of sense. And even let's assume

**[1:02:43]** technically all of those things get figured out. Let's assume you could take out the delay. Let's

**[1:02:48]** assume you could warm up your numbers with the telcos or something. Let's just assume all that.

**[1:02:53]** I think the thing that stuck out to me the most was being prepared for when that person answers,

**[1:03:00]** being ready, being meaningful, intentional, thoughtful. And also before that call was even

**[1:03:08]** dialed, having the posture of I don't need to book a meeting. I don't need to sell this person. I'm

**[1:03:14]** here to learn. And if it's helpful, I'll move to a meeting that changes the entire thing.

**[1:03:20]** Entirely. Yeah, we accept a lot of degradation to everything around

**[1:03:26]** getting into a connect in exchange for getting the, you know, getting the connect. And we do

**[1:03:30]** that through volume. And so I think it's a, it's a vortex that we're in that a lot of people find

**[1:03:36]** themselves in, but not knowing. I mean, think about it from a sales perspective. If I told you,

**[1:03:40]** hey, there might be five prospects in the waiting room. I'm not going to tell you

**[1:03:47]** if none of them are there or if all five are there or if just one's there and the door opens

**[1:03:53]** and one comes in, how prepared are you going to be for that prospect? You're not. And so that,

**[1:04:01]** that is parallel dialing is you've got a waiting room that has a who knows who's in there. If

**[1:04:06]** anyone's in there and the moment someone finally comes in, I don't know who it is. Right. And so

**[1:04:11]** when you make a ton of volume, too, this is the benefit of Titan X is if I know who's going to

**[1:04:15]** answer, I can sit down and methodically think through Anthony, Sarah, Johnny, everyone on this

**[1:04:22]** list. And I can prepare for each of those because my odds of talking to them is not 25% in total.

**[1:04:27]** It's 25% every time I try them. It's 85 to 90% chance over time that I will talk to this person.

**[1:04:34]** So none of that is in vain. I'm, you know, every ounce of research I put into these calls,

**[1:04:40]** 90% of that's worthwhile versus if I have a hundred people and I research all 100 of them,

**[1:04:45]** but only nine or 11 of them are ever going to answer in the next 500, 600 dials.

**[1:04:52]** Most of that was waste. 90% of that was waste. And so that's, that's a fundamental difference

**[1:04:56]** is not only can I be more prepared, I can also know they're likely to answer and I'm going to

**[1:05:00]** reach them in the next seven dials. Mathematically speaking, I don't have this awkward pause in the

**[1:05:05]** way. And because I'm making less dials and I'm having more conversations, more connected calls,

**[1:05:10]** and I'm having longer conversations and more prepared, I'm training the telecoast to say

**[1:05:14]** they're trustworthy. Don't spam that number. They have talk time that connects four out of,

**[1:05:19]** you know, one out of four times they call someone. It's slower. They're making less dials. And so you

**[1:05:26]** don't create the spam issue as easily. You don't have the pause that hurts the performance.

**[1:05:30]** And you can be more prepared, which increases the performance when you get on the call.

**[1:05:35]** It's very easy pitch. This is why we do well.

**[1:05:41]** I've learned a ton on this and I know I'm working in high growth B2B SAS and AI companies that are

**[1:05:49]** trying to scale quickly. They're not doing phone well. They're not, first of all, likely

**[1:05:56]** not even leveraging because they don't even know where to start. Second, if they are doing it,

**[1:06:00]** they're doing it completely wrong. And then just loading up the spam cannon for their,

**[1:06:05]** for their dialers. And they're definitely not putting in the prep or having the posture and

**[1:06:10]** perspective of what this even means for the business. So I've had probably 10 mind blowing

**[1:06:17]** perspective changes throughout this conversation. So I really appreciate everything you share. One,

**[1:06:23]** empathizing with the problem from the beginning through your story. And then the level of

**[1:06:28]** commitment you have based on the size of bet you made. And the proof is in all the momentum

**[1:06:35]** that Titan X is having right now. So I'm really, really excited for our customers to watch this,

**[1:06:42]** for our audience to watch this, for my team to watch it. And I really enjoyed this. So thanks

## 01:06:47 — Where to find Joey and TitanX

**[1:06:47]** for sharing everything you did. I'll just leave last thing, best way to get, if they didn't get

**[1:06:52]** called by you, best way to get in touch with your team or, or find that next. Yeah. If you want to

**[1:06:58]** find me, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/joagilkey. And then if you're interested in

**[1:07:05]** Titan X, Titan X.io. We got a big launch coming up here in about a month and a half where I'm going

**[1:07:10]** to take all this stuff we're talking about and force it to be a decision the market has to make.

**[1:07:15]** So stay tuned to that. Can't wait. Can't wait. Well, Joey, thank you so much for everything.

**[1:07:21]** I can't wait to see what you and Titan X do next. Thanks, brother. Thanks for having me on.