The $2,400 cold call batch that taught me volume was never the problem

Back in 2019 I was running outbound for a small SaaS shop out of Columbus and we were blasting 800 calls a day per rep, thinking more dials meant more deals. One Tuesday our CRM guy pulled the report and showed me we had a 0.4% connect rate while a competitor rep doing 120 calls a week was booking 3x the meetings. Turned out I'd been skipping the 30 second research step on every lead and just reading the same script to whoever picked up, so nobody felt like a person was on the other end. I cut our daily list to 90 names, wrote one line about each company before dialing, and our booked demos went from 6 to 19 in a month. Curious if anyone here has gone the other way and found volume still wins for their market, or is it always about quality?

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nguyen.blake3d ago

A 0.4% connect rate at 800 dials a day is wild to me, that means most reps were basically talking to voicemail for eight hours straight. I get why the team thought more dials was the fix, since it feels like work even when nothing lands, but the math never backs it up. Your jump from 6 to 19 demos on a list that small is the part that really got me, since you cut the volume by almost 90% and tripled the result. What did the 90 names look like compared to the old 800, were they mostly warmer leads or just better picked targets?

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