Joey Gilkey on TitanX, Cold Calling and the Art of the Follow-Up
Joey Gilkey is back on the channel more than two years after his first interview. He's now the CEO of TitanX, formerly known as Phone Ready Leads, a tool that helps people who cold call reach more of the people they dial. Joey explains why he shut down a services business to go all in on software, how he went from reseller to owner of the product, and what email-first teams should know before they pick up the phone. The last part of the conversation is a masterclass in follow-up, which Joey credits for most of his success.
Watch the episode
Topics covered
- Why Joey left services for software
- How TitanX helps callers go from a 3% to a 20 to 30% connect rate
- Going from customer to reseller to owner of Phone Ready Leads
- Knowing a market's pain before you build software
- What email-first teams should know about cold calling
- List, message, rep and follow-up
- Value-add follow-ups, gifting and landing enterprise deals
Key takeaways
- Services businesses keep running into the same problem: clients who want results faster than is realistic. A product that does exactly what it promises removes most of the headaches.
- Build software for a market whose pain you already know deeply, rather than building first and hunting for customers.
- The phone is not just a conversion channel. It's an intel channel, because you get two-way feedback from the buyer even when they say no.
- Phones have deliverability problems too. Carrier spam labels like "spam likely" keep connect rates low, which is the problem TitanX is built to solve.
- Joey's framework for outbound on any channel is list, message, rep and follow-up. Follow-up is the part most people fail at.
- Most of the market isn't buying right now. Work out where each person sits and follow up accordingly.
- Follow-ups need substance. Bring something useful from the last conversation, or a gift that fits the person, instead of "just checking in".
Show notes
💻 Why Joey left services for software
Joey had been in services for seven years and built a strong brand, so Michael asks what made him commit to software. Part of it is leverage: software is worth a much higher multiple if you ever sell. The bigger reason is that the problems with services don't go away, and the biggest one is clients. Smaller companies hiring an outsourced sales team want to see success on a much shorter timeline than reality allows, while Joey's belief is that outbound works when you do the fundamentals, at scale, consistently, over time.
Apex Revenue, the company that acquired TitanX, was several million dollars larger than the software when he decided to shut it down. Unwinding the two would have slowed him down, so he walked away from services to scale the software. He says the product has far fewer headaches because it delivers exactly what it promises every time: callers who typically connect on 3% of dials get somewhere between 20 and 30% with TitanX.
🤝 From customer to reseller to owner
Joey tells the story of how he ended up owning the product. A former competitor who ran an outsourced sales agency exited around the same time Joey did, in early 2020. That founder went "up funnel" to solve data problems and built Phone Ready Leads, while Joey went "down funnel" into revenue operations with Sales Driven Agency, which became Apex Revenue. The two stayed friendly.
Joey started using Phone Ready Leads for his own SDRs, then for clients, then paid to become a licensee and reseller. After months of negotiating, he acquired it. His plan was to keep it for his own clients so competitors couldn't have it, and he only sold it quietly to a few large accounts such as Hitachi. It became clear that the product was worth more than the service around it. His one regret is not turning it into public software about six months earlier.
Asked whether people should start with software instead of an agency, Joey says he could have done it earlier with his experience. As advice, though, he thinks you need deep knowledge of a market and its pain first.
“if you don't have a deep knowledge of a market and their pain then you're going to build a software and go try to find customers for it”
Joey Gilkey, 13:27
☎️ What email people should know about cold calling
Michael says he's platform agnostic: phone, email, LinkedIn, mail and trade shows all work. For an audience of mostly email people, Joey shares what to know before trying the phone. Every channel has pros and cons, and he calls himself a phone purist, though his team also runs cold email, LinkedIn and paid media.
What he likes most about the phone is that it's the only channel with two-way feedback from the buyer. Even a short or rude call tells you something about that person and that account. With email, someone who isn't interested usually just doesn't reply or unsubscribes, so there's little intel to follow up on.
He also warns that calling is hard. People aren't expecting the call, and there's a deliverability problem just like email. When carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile flag a number as "spam likely", people don't answer. Going from a 3% average connect rate to the 25% average he cites for TitanX is the lift the product is built for.
“realize that the phone is not just a conversion channel but it's an intel channel”
Joey Gilkey, 17:11
🎯 List, message, rep and follow-up
Joey's framework for outbound applies to any channel, but he walks through it for the phone:
- List: your targeting has to be dialed in.
- Message: how you communicate your product, offer and value, and how that relates to your list.
- Rep: whoever makes the calls has to deliver the message the right way, from tone and pace to knowing when to push and when to pull back, and how to extract intel even without a conversion.
- Follow-up: the part everyone fails at.
He points to Chet Holmes' market pyramid: 3% of the market is buying, 7% is open to it, 30% isn't thinking about it, 30% isn't interested now and 30% never will be. If you only look for conversions, you're only chasing that 3%, so where someone sits in the pyramid should shape how you follow up.
🏆 The fat stacks are in the circle backs
Michael notes that beginners struggle to believe that someone who ignored them a year ago will buy, but people who've been in business for years see it happen. Joey says that this year alone he has landed Dell, IBM, HP, Hitachi, Workday, Talkdesk, ZoomInfo, Paychex and other large enterprises. Each took dozens of touch points per person on buying committees of five or six people.
He credits his career earnings to mastering follow-up, not to being great at cold calling or building a brand on LinkedIn. His metaphor is Amazon: he buys a coffee mug in minutes, while his wife reads every review and the FAQ, adds it to her cart, compares others, then comes back and buys. In B2B, more buyers behave like his wife, so they need to be followed and educated, much like retargeting in advertising.
“we always say like the fat stacks are in the circle backs”
Joey Gilkey, 21:08
🎁 Follow-ups with substance
Michael adds an important note: this isn't about "just bumping this" emails. Joey agrees. Needy follow-ups like "where are we at with this?" subconsciously tell people they haven't held up their end of the deal, and nobody likes that.
Instead, bring value from something you learned in a previous conversation. His example is a note offering a quick analysis on reducing sales headcount after a prospect mentioned it two weeks earlier. Gifting works too. Joey says he landed one fairly large deal after sending a prospect a cigar and bourbon, because he'd found out that's what the person liked. Michael recommends the book Giftology for anyone who wants to learn gifting.
To learn more, Joey points people to his LinkedIn, where he warns he's "very polarizing" in his opinions.
About Joey Gilkey
Joey Gilkey is the CEO of TitanX, formerly known as Phone Ready Leads. He has spent most of his career in services: marketing services, sales services and outsourced sales development. He sold an outsourced sales development company, then built a fractional VP of sales company, Sales Driven Agency, which later became Apex Revenue.
In mid 2023 he acquired what is now TitanX and turned it into software. Joey later shut Apex down to focus 100% on the software, which he says now has traction from Fortune 100 companies down to emerging startups. Michael describes Joey as a mentor and friend of many years. This is his second time on the channel, after a 2022 interview about Sales Driven Agency.
Episode links
Want cold email that books meetings without the guesswork?
Michael’s team at DFY Meetings has worked with 500+ companies and booked 5k+ calls.
Book a call →