The GTM Launchpad is where we open the hood on B2B revenue - fixing structure, sharpening outbound and building pipeline that actually holds up

I somehow made it 37 years without ever setting foot in Texas. Then TitanX invited me to Dallas for Precision ’26, put me in a room with a bunch of people I genuinely enjoy learning from and gave us the chance to spend time inside the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium. Not a bad way to cross off a first trip.

Monday night was about catching up. Tuesday was sessions, football, a lot of laughs, and conversations with people I’ve known online for years but rarely get to spend real time with. I even got to run around on the Cowboys’ field which was a nice reminder that my hamstrings and my ambitions are no longer the same age 😂

But what stuck with me after I got home wasn’t the stadium. It was the conversations and a set of numbers shared at the event that made me think about what we’re paying to create conversations inside our own sales organizations

I’ve been back in the weeds building outbound, inspecting call recordings and coaching SDRs all week. So when the discussion turned to the economics of cold calling, it hit pretty close to home.

We’ve gotten incredibly good at producing and measuring activity, but I’m not convinced we’ve gotten nearly as good at measuring what the activity was supposed to create.

The conversation is the KPI and if we’re going to keep adding tech and automation to outbound we need to get a lot more serious about what a real conversation costs.

Jason Bay shared a recap of the calling analysis discussed at TitanX

3,031,312 cold calls across 1,208 sales reps

The reported findings covered contact frequency, dialing methods, connection rates, meeting rates and the differences between higher and lower-producing reps.

One comparison jumped off the page. In that analysis, power-dialed calls showed a 9.7% connect rate, compared with 2.0% for the comparison group. That’s an observed difference in the reported data not proof that switching every team to power dialing would magically produce the same result. List quality, rep behavior, timing and other factors still matter.

But the cost figures were the real gut punch

The recap estimated that a meeting booked by the top 20% of reps cost about $1,125, compared with $19,415 for the bottom 25%.

Those are reported cost-per-meeting estimates, not cost per conversation and I haven’t independently audited the underlying cost assumptions. I’m sharing them because they expose the operating question we should all be asking

What are we actually paying to get a salesperson into a legitimate conversation with somebody who might buy?

I can walk into almost any outbound team and find a dashboard showing dials, emails, sequence steps, connects and booked meetings. I get it. Those are easy inputs to count, they help managers coach activity and sometimes the team really does need to pick up the phone more.

The trouble starts when the easiest number to collect becomes the number everybody optimizes.

A rep can hit an enormous dial target while burning hours on disconnected numbers and people who no longer work at the company.

A team can report hundreds of connects without knowing how many buyers actually spoke to a seller.

And we can spend more on technology to make all of that happen faster without improving the underlying economics at all

Volume can look great right up until you calculate what it cost to produce something useful

This part has been front and center in my client work. When I look past an activity report and start reviewing the actual calls, the word connect becomes pretty slippery.

The wrong person picks up - Connect

Somebody answers and hangs up in four seconds - Connect

You reach a former employee or a number that doesn’t belong to your target. Depending on the platform and dispositions that can also show up in the connected-call bucket.

Then a relevant person answers, tells you how the team operates today, explains where something is frustrating them, pushes back on your assumption or gives you a reason to speak with someone else inside the account. Also a connect but that’s where the real sales work finally begins.

If we count those outcomes as though they’re interchangeable we end up fixing the wrong problem.

We coach the opener when the rep is dialing bad data.

We buy more data when the rep is getting through but talking at people.

We celebrate a booking rate without asking whether the meeting has any chance of becoming pipeline.

I want to separate a legitimate buyer conversation from a logged connect.

It doesn’t have to turn into a meeting to count. A good conversation can tell you the timing is wrong, uncover another stakeholder, disqualify the account or give you better context for a future touch but there has to be a genuine exchange with someone relevant and the rep should come away knowing something they didn’t know before.

Once we agree on that definition the rest of the dashboard gets more useful.

We can actually determine whether the bottleneck is targeting, phone data, connection strategy, conversation quality or moving the right opportunities forward.

Here’s the exercise I want more sales leaders to run.

Take a defined period say, the last 30 days and add up what you actually spent operating outbound during that period.

Include the relevant rep compensation, dialing and data tools, enrichment, sequencing and the management or outsourced resources directly supporting that motion.

Be consistent about what you include

Then divide that cost by the number of legitimate buyer conversations the team created in the same period.

Cost per real conversation =
relevant outbound operating cost ÷ legitimate buyer conversations

That number isn’t a universal league table.

A technical enterprise conversation and a transactional SMB conversation won’t have identical economics and a cheap conversation with the wrong person isn’t a win.

What matters is seeing your own trend and using the number alongside conversation quality, meeting progression and pipeline created.

If cost per conversation is climbing because you’re paying sellers to work bad inventory, clean up the inventory.

If conversation volume is healthy but opportunities aren’t moving, inspect the first minute of those calls, the diagnostic questions and the handoff standard.

If meetings are showing up but the AEs don’t want them, revisit what you’re calling a qualified next step.

Those are three different problems yet I still see teams respond to all three with some version of “We need more activity.”

Maybe you do but wouldn’t you rather know which part of the machine needs more activity before you buy another machine?

One thing TitanX got right was creating a room where people could actually talk.

The content was concentrated, the experience felt informal and there was room to catch up with old friends and meet people without feeling like you were sprinting between 40-minute presentations all day.

That mattered more to me than collecting the largest possible attendee list. I got to spend time with people I already knew, finally meet others face-to-face and have a few conversations I’d be excited to continue. I came home with ideas, relationships and a much better sense of where I want to spend my energy next.

Afterward, we organized the official attendee roster and built a relationship map.

There were 121 verified names on that roster. That doesn’t mean I met 121 people, and it definitely doesn’t mean 121 people should get a templated follow-up email from me. Some are friends, some are potential partners, a few might be commercial fits and plenty are simply names that need context before I do anything.

The right next step is to choose a handful of real conversations worth continuing, remember what we actually discussed and follow up like a human.

The technology can help me organize and prepare
It cannot manufacture a relationship I didn’t earn in the room

That’s a pretty good analogy for outbound. Access to more names isn’t the same as access to more opportunities. What you do with the attention you earn is where the value starts.

Back home, I’ve been rebuilding a client's outbound workflow around account fit, buying committees, intent signals, usable data, calling, coaching and clean CRM history. I’m deliberately not naming the client or exposing their internal performance here but the operating lesson applies to almost anybody running an SDR team.

The job of the system is to put the seller in a better position to have a real conversation.

That means knowing which account deserves attention, which person matters, why the timing could be relevant, what has already happened and what the next approved move should be.

Then it needs to keep bad records and existing customer relationships from being treated like net-new prospects.

But there’s a point where the system has to hand over to the human. When somebody answers, the rep needs to listen, adapt and diagnose.

One behavior I keep coaching is simple: ask one more question before you explain. We can invest all this money getting the right person on the phone and then lose the moment because the seller is in a hurry to pitch.

After the call, I want the outcome classified honestly.

Bad data? Wrong role? Bad timing? A useful account insight? A genuine problem and an earned next step? That information should feed the next round of targeting and coaching rather than disappear into a generic disposition.

AI should help us prepare that context, reduce the busywork and learn from what actually happened. It shouldn’t become an excuse to make more noise at a lower cost per dial while the cost per meaningful outcome keeps climbing.

If you're leading outbound, pull up last week's results and put five things beside one another: total outbound operating cost, legitimate buyer conversations, cost per real conversation, conversation-to-next-step progression and qualified pipeline created then listen to a few real calls behind the numbers.

Don't start by comparing your team against the stadium presentation or somebody else's LinkedIn benchmark.

Start by getting one honest baseline for your own business. Agree on what qualifies as a real conversation, use the same definition next week and investigate why the trend changes.

You might discover that your reps need fewer bad numbers, not more dials. You might discover that they’re getting through but aren't asking enough questions.

Or you might find that the motion creates good conversations and the real leak is what happens between the SDR and the AE.

That's how the conversation KPI becomes more than a catchy phrase. It tells you where to inspect next and whether the money you're spending is actually moving you closer to pipeline.

I’m excited about what’s happening with sales tech. We have better targeting, faster research, stronger signals and more ways to make a seller's day easier than I could have imagined when I started cold calling.

But the easier activity becomes to manufacture, the less impressed I am by activity alone.

A couple of days in Dallas reminded me that putting people in the same room doesn't automatically create a relationship. The conversation does.

And the same principle holds when we're paying sales teams to reach people who didn't ask to hear from us.

If your outbound dashboard turned off tomorrow, could you tell me how many real conversations your team created last week, what those conversations cost and how many became something worth pursuing?

That's the question I'd start with.

The future of outbound isn't more noise.

It's more of the right conversations and a system that knows what they actually cost.

Hit reply and tell me: Is your team tracking real conversations yet or are you still managing mostly to dials, connects and meetings?

And if you saw me attempt a touchdown celebration at Cowboys Stadium, let's agree that footage stays off the internet 😂

Have a great Monday 🤙

Thanks for reading. See you again next week at 8 am MST!

- Tom Slocum ✌️

I help B2B founders and sales leaders build the structure underneath pipeline so the team can actually run it

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