Demo Day #3 Recap: Can TitanX Live Up to the Hype?

Key Takeaways:

• Engagement and data tools make up 53% of what teams are adding to their stacks this year. Connect rates are still the problem everyone is trying to buy their way out of.
• Across the teams Stakki advises, around 60% of meetings come from the second, third or later conversation with a prospect. Reach rate matters more than connect rate.
• TitanX's data says parallel dialling is the main cause of spam-flagged numbers. In one 12-month case study, 4% of dials (single-line) produced 55% of the meetings.
• TitanX scores the phone number, not the company: P1 (picks up), P2 (right number, unproven), P3 (never picks up) and bad data. Only around a third of a typical list is worth phoning.
• In the product, reps can't skip follow-ups, campaigns run on conversation targets rather than dial targets, and a managed service keeps your numbers clean.

On 4 November, Stakki and the SDR Leaders of EMEA community ran our third vendor Demo Day. This time we changed the format: one vendor, one live demo, and plenty of room for questions. The title was deliberately blunt: Can TitanX back up the hype?

Why TitanX, and why now? Dialers and mobile data are the tools we get asked about most. TitanX has been one of the loudest voices in the market, arguing that parallel dialling has broken phone connectivity. Gerry Hill joined us to show the data behind that claim and walk through the product. Here's what you need to know.

Setting the Scene: How We Got Here

Phone is going the same way email went, and parallel dialling is a big reason why.

I opened with what we're seeing in the stacks we advise on. This year, 53% of the tools teams are adding or considering are engagement and data tools. Two of the top four most-considered tools are dialers. At our Diallers Unplugged roundtable in May 2025, 28% of leaders were switching dialers and 50% were buying more mobile data. Eighteen months on, the question hasn't gone away.

The story of how we got here is a familiar one:

1. Email first. Sequencing tools let teams send at a volume no human could. Inbox providers caught on, deliverability broke, and now we all buy domains and warm inboxes just to land.
2. Then parallel dialling. Dialing five lines at once and dropping four of them looks nothing like human behaviour. As parallel took off, almost every other tool added it as a feature.
3. Now the phone network is pushing back. Every call passes through up to nine gates before it rings. Carriers watch how fast you dial, how many lines you open and how short your calls are. More numbers are getting flagged as spam.

Connect rate isn't the number that matters. Reach rate is.

Most teams measure connect rate: how many dials it takes to get a conversation. The better question is reach rate: of 1,000 prospects, how many do I eventually speak to? Across the customers and SDR teams we've advised recently, around 60% of meetings come from the second, third or later conversation with a prospect. If you burn your numbers chasing first connects, you never get to the follow-ups where the meetings are.

The Claims TitanX Makes

TitanX's pitch: cheap activity is expensive, and precision beats volume.

Gerry framed it as a series of sales eras. First the craftsman era, when sellers picked accounts and prospected with care. Then Predictable Revenue brought role specialisation and SDRs. Then automation, COVID and cheap money made volume look like a strategy. Now boards want more with less, and most teams respond by doing more.

The cycle he described will be familiar to most SDR leaders:

• Connect rates fall, so leadership asks for more activity.
• Reps dial more, at colder lists.
• Numbers get spam-flagged and domains burn.
• Reps get demoralised, and connect rates fall further.

From there, TitanX makes four claims:

1. "Cheap activity can be extraordinarily expensive production." Volume has hidden costs that never show up in a dashboard.
2. The parallel efficiency fallacy. Adding more lines to a dial session makes it less efficient, not more.
3. Spam is the number one hidden cost in cold calling. Most teams don't know they have a spam problem because nothing in their stack tells them.
4. Only a minority of buyers answer the phone. Teams treat every prospect the same, when they should focus calling on the ones who pick up.

TitanX says it exists to fix two problems: deliverability (can I place a call that actually rings?) and receptivity (am I calling people who answer?). In Gerry's words, the goal is to take sellers back to the craftsman era, not keep them as cogs in a system.

The Stats Gerry Shared

In one 12-month case study, 4% of dials produced 55% of the meetings.

All of Gerry's figures come from TitanX customer data, pooled across hundreds of companies and thousands of reps, with a strong European skew. The customers run a mix of platforms, from Salesloft and Outreach to other dialers.

Single-line vs parallel: one team, 12 months

One customer ran both motions side by side, across around 216,000 dials in total.

That's roughly 30 times more dials for every meeting on parallel. Faster dialling didn't buy more coverage. It bought more expensive meetings.

The hidden cost of spam

• Parallel dialling and spam: at any one time, 27.97% of numbers on pure parallel dialling were spam-flagged, against 1.1% on pure single-line. Gerry put parallel at 250% more likely to end up in spam.
• Even with spam stripped out, parallel halves your chance of getting a call delivered.
• Wasted payroll: across 28 companies, calling on spam numbers burned about 1,200 days of rep time. At a $100,000 OTE, that's close to $4.3 million in payroll, or about 1.5 heads a year per company.
• A real example: a data centre vendor had three phone numbers shared between four senior reps. They made around 14,000 attempts, close to a month's work, chasing CTOs on numbers that weren't getting through.

Why reach is so low

• Most reps give up after about 2.2 attempts per prospect. With a one-in-five connect rate and one attempt, you've only had 20% of the conversations available to you.
• 18–22% of people in most markets will answer a call from an unknown number. In Europe, around 15% of the 2.3 million records TitanX scored came back as P1 (likely to pick up).
• Only about 34–35% of a typical list is viable for phone prospecting. Most teams are working just 1.5–2% of the channel.

Fix the motion before you buy anything

Gerry's model for a 1,200-rep team on an $80,000 OTE, booking 10,000 meetings at $9,300 each:

1. Remove the 22% of reps making 1,000+ dials with zero meetings.
2. Move the remaining reps to single-line power dialling. Cost per meeting falls to $2,500.
3. Fix spam. Cost per meeting falls to $2,200.

No new tools, no new sequences: just removing and fixing. TitanX says customers who then add its data and dialer reach 25% connect rates and meetings under $1,000.

Europe is tightening the rules

• UK: Ofcom is blocking spoofed UK numbers that come from abroad.
• France: new rules, built on the US STIR/SHAKEN framework, target unauthenticated calls.
• Germany: numbers that arrive from abroad show as unknown. You need numbers tied to a German entity.
• Spain: sales calls can't come from mobile numbers.

Gerry's view: consumer trust laws are bleeding into B2B, and the number your buyer sees decides whether they pick up nine times out of ten.

The Demo: Score, Then Dial

TitanX scores the person's phone number, then builds the calling workflow around that score.

1. Phone intent scoring

TitanX doesn't score the company, its intent or website visits. It scores the phone number, using around 72 data points weighted mainly on phone network data and a history of past dial outcomes. Every contact lands in one of four groups:

P1 rates swing a lot by market. Gerry quoted about 7.5% for cyber security executives at large companies, up to 30% for field operations roles in facilities, logistics and trucking. P1 connect rates average around 32% in Europe against 22% in the US, because the spam problem hasn't hit Europe as hard yet.

In the demo, Gerry sent 95,000 records in from ZoomInfo and Salesforce. About 21,000 came back as viable for phone-first prospecting, 69% fell into P2 or P3, and 8% were bad data.

2. Campaigns built on conversations, not dials

Scored lists become campaigns. Each campaign holds scripts, battle cards, links and example calls, and can be shared across several reps with leaderboards. The standout feature is objectives: for example, "15 conversations on this campaign by Friday". Reps work to a conversation target, not a dial target.

3. The Smart Stream: follow-ups you can't skip

The rep's daily view puts follow-ups at the top. Reps can't skip or remove them, and can't start new cold calls until the follow-ups are done. Gerry tied this straight back to the 60% figure from the opening: most meetings come from follow-up conversations, and task-based tools make it too easy to skip them.

Each contact shows a timeline of every past call and outcome. In the demo, a prospect had three short "not now" conversations over six weeks. That's exactly the person worth a fourth call.

4. Account-level recording

Call recordings tie to both the campaign and the account, so every account builds up first-party data on how it responds.

5. Titan Defence

This is a managed service rather than a feature. A TitanX team watches your numbers, cleans flagged ones and warms new numbers with bot calls until they've built a reputation. Gerry said their numbers run about 70% clean at any one time, dipping to 50% when the networks act up. His point: swapping in a brand-new number isn't a fix, because the network distrusts numbers with no history.

Highlights and practical tips

• Listen to the dial tone. If a number snaps straight to voicemail, or rings twice and drops, it's probably spam-flagged.
• Voicemail is a risk. Hanging up halfway through someone's voicemail greeting looks like a spam call. Listen through to the beep, then hang up.
• Pre-recorded voicemail drops invite the "Spam and delete" option on iPhone, which can block the number for good.
• Rotate numbers about every eight dials, at random intervals. Around 30 dials an hour on one number will scorch it.
• Don't over-filter. Teams that stack suppression and signals down to lists of 100, then add phone scoring, end up with 15 contacts. Filter by channel first, then by signals.

From the Q&A

The room pushed hardest on cost, overlap with existing tools and how the scoring actually works.

"How does it score numbers? Are call centres involved? Does it track my dials?"

TitanX started life as Phone Ready Leads, a service that used an offshore contact centre to call each prospect several times over 15 days. TitanX acquired it and rebuilt it as an algorithm. Today it's about 99% technology. Humans only do quality checks, usually on test data rather than customer data.

"How often should we re-score data?"

Once a quarter, or every 5,000–10,000 records, whichever comes first. Behaviour does change, but re-scoring in big batches might yield 5% new P1s. Re-scoring daily yields about 0.1% and wastes money.

"If we already enrich through Clay, isn't this paying for enrichment twice?"

Gerry didn't dodge it: yes, there is a double-cost element. TitanX has moved from consumption pricing to seats, with credits that can be pooled across the whole team for the year. The dialer and workflow are included in the seat.

"Is this a sales engagement platform? Can it run LinkedIn and email too?"

No, and deliberately so. TitanX doesn't want to fight the engagement platform arms race. It has light sequencing for P2s, but the bet is on integrations: Outreach at the end of this month, Salesloft by the end of the year and Gong Engage in January. Data-only customers can push P1/P2/P3, best number, IVR and extension into fields in tools like Nooks and Outreach. One customer, Amex, routes all non-conversation email through Outreach so its reps can call all day.

"How does pricing compare to Orum and Nooks?"

Seat-based, with two tiers: a strategic seat for higher-volume SDRs and full-cycle AEs, and a precision seat. Each seat includes monthly credits, the dialer, 10 named and owned phone numbers, and Titan Defence. In competitive deals, Gerry said TitanX usually prices between Nooks (higher) and Orum (lower).

"We rotate numbers every 20–30 dials in Nooks, and test our numbers by calling each other every morning. Is that worth it?"

The testing is a great habit that few teams bother with. The rotation is too slow: aim for about every 10 dials. And once you find a number you trust, look after it rather than throwing it back into a high-volume rotation.

"Can we trial it?" Gerry offered every attendee a free spam audit. Share a few fields of call outcome data from any system and TitanX will show how exposed your numbers are. It works for EMEA, the US and Commonwealth Asia.

The Stakki Take: Does TitanX Live Up to the Hype?

On the problem, yes. On the fix, it depends on how your team calls today.

The diagnosis matches what we see in the stacks we advise on. Teams chase connect rates with more volume, numbers burn quietly, and follow-ups get skipped. TitanX is one of the few vendors putting hard numbers on the cost of that, and building a product that pushes reps the other way. Here's how we'd act on it.

1. Treat the numbers as TitanX's own. The stats are strong, but they come from TitanX's customer base and its own analysis. Use them to ask better questions, then test them against your own data.
2. Take the free spam audit, whatever dialer you use. It costs nothing and answers the question most teams can't: are my numbers getting through? If they aren't, nothing else in this post matters until you fix it.
3. Fix the motion before you buy. Gerry's own model got most of the savings by removing and fixing, not adding. Check rep-level dials against meetings, move people off parallel where it isn't working, and rotate numbers properly.
4. Measure reach, not just connects. Track attempts per prospect and conversations per prospect. If your reps stop at two attempts, that's where your meetings are going missing.
5. Know where it fits. TitanX suits phone-heavy teams selling into account-based or high-value markets, where every conversation is worth a lot. If your stack is built around Nooks or Outreach, the data-only route avoids paying twice for a sales dialer. If you're a smaller, cost-conscious team already paying for enrichment, weigh the double cost Gerry admitted to before you commit.

Watch the Full Session and Test It Yourself

Start with the audit. It's free and it tells you whether you have a problem.

• Watch the recording: here on our youtube
• TitanX spam audit: Gerry will share the fields he needs. We'll send them to everyone who registered.
• Talk it through with us:  speak to Stakki, if you want a second opinion on your dialer setup.

Thanks to Gerry for a data-heavy session that didn't shy away from the hard questions, and to Dave and the SDR Leaders of EMEA community for co-hosting. Questions about anything you saw? Ask us, that's what Stakki is for.

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James Donaldson

Founder, Stakki