Overview

Cold calling is not dead. What has died is the spray-and-pray approach where reps dial through lists of unqualified numbers hoping someone picks up. Modern phone-based sales engagement requires precision: knowing who to call, why they matter, and what to say when they answer. Outreach Voice and Dialer provide the infrastructure to execute this strategy at scale.

For GTM Engineers, the challenge extends beyond simply configuring a dialer. You need to integrate calling workflows with your broader sales engagement stack, capture conversation intelligence for downstream analysis, and optimize for connect rates without burning through your prospect list. This guide covers the technical setup, configuration best practices, and integration patterns that maximize the value of phone as a channel.

The phone remains uniquely powerful because it creates real-time, two-way communication. Unlike email where prospects can ignore or delay responses, a live conversation forces engagement and surfaces objections immediately. When combined with the research and qualification workflows that modern GTM stacks enable, phone becomes a precision instrument rather than a blunt object.

Understanding Outreach Voice and Dialer

Outreach offers two distinct but complementary capabilities for phone-based engagement. Understanding the difference matters for both licensing and workflow design.

Outreach Voice

Outreach Voice is the core telephony infrastructure that enables calling directly from the Outreach platform. It provides click-to-dial functionality from prospect records, automatic call logging, voicemail drop capabilities, and basic call recording. Voice is included in most Outreach plans and serves as the foundation for phone activities.

Key capabilities include:

• Click-to-dial from any prospect or account record
• Automatic activity logging to CRM
• Pre-recorded voicemail drops for efficiency
• Local presence dialing to improve connect rates
• Call recording for compliance and coaching

Outreach Dialer

The Dialer builds on Voice by adding power-dialing capabilities designed for high-volume calling. Instead of manually clicking through a list, Dialer automatically queues and connects calls, minimizing the dead time between conversations. This is essential for SDR teams running high-velocity outbound motions.

Dialer modes include:

Initial Configuration Steps

Setting up Outreach Voice and Dialer requires coordination between your Outreach admin, telephony provider, and CRM. The following steps establish the foundation for effective phone engagement.

Maximizing Connect Rates

The fundamental challenge with phone outreach is reaching prospects. Average connect rates hover around 5-8% for cold outbound, meaning 92-95% of dials go unanswered. Improving this metric by even a few percentage points dramatically increases calling efficiency.

Local Presence and Caller ID Reputation

Local presence dialing remains the most impactful technical lever. Outreach Voice can automatically select numbers from your pool that match the prospect's area code. However, effectiveness depends on maintaining healthy caller ID reputation scores.

Carrier spam filters increasingly flag high-volume calling numbers. Monitor your numbers using tools like Hiya or First Orion, and rotate numbers before they get flagged. Outreach provides some visibility into number health, but proactive monitoring prevents sudden drops in connect rates.

Timing Optimization

Call timing affects connect rates more than most teams realize. The optimal calling window varies by persona and industry, but general patterns emerge:

Outreach allows you to configure calling hours by timezone, automatically respecting prospect local time. Configure these guardrails at the org level to prevent reps from calling outside productive windows.

Data Quality and Phone Number Verification

Poor phone data wastes dialing time and damages number reputation. Before importing lists into your dialer, verify phone numbers through services like ZoomInfo, Lusha, or data enrichment tools. The data hygiene practices you apply to email equally matter for phone numbers.

Track your wrong number and disconnected rates by data source. If a particular provider consistently delivers bad numbers, factor that into your enrichment strategy. Tools like Octave can help correlate data quality metrics across sources to identify the most reliable providers for your target personas.

Integrating Phone with Multi-Channel Sequences

Phone steps within Outreach sequences create coordinated multi-channel engagement. The key is positioning calls strategically rather than treating them as just another touchpoint.

Sequence Design Patterns

Effective call placement within sequences follows predictable patterns. Consider this structure for an initial outbound sequence:

The sequence building tools available today can help optimize this structure based on your historical data, but the phone-after-email pattern consistently outperforms cold calls without prior context.

Dynamic Call Tasks

Outreach sequences can create call tasks that appear in rep queues at the appropriate time. Configure these tasks with:

• Context snippets pulled from CRM or enrichment data
• Suggested talking points based on persona or use case
• Links to recent engagement (email opens, website visits)
• Reference to any trigger events that initiated the sequence

This context transformation aligns with the broader goal of personalizing outreach across channels. Phone conversations benefit from the same research that powers personalized email, but the delivery mechanism shifts from written copy to verbal talking points.

Capturing Conversation Intelligence

Every call generates valuable data beyond the basic outcome. Modern sales engagement requires capturing, transcribing, and analyzing conversations to improve rep performance and inform GTM strategy.

Outreach Kaia Integration

Outreach Kaia provides real-time conversation intelligence during calls, surfacing relevant content cards and capturing key moments. For video meetings, Kaia joins as a participant; for phone calls, it analyzes the audio stream.

Key Kaia capabilities for phone calls include:

• Automatic transcription with speaker identification
• Topic detection and keyword tracking
• Competitive mention alerts
• Talk-time ratio analysis
• Action item extraction

Building a Conversation Data Pipeline

Call transcripts become valuable assets when they flow into your broader data infrastructure. Consider these integration patterns:

CRM Sync: Push transcripts and summaries to opportunity records so AEs have context before follow-up meetings. The field mapping for call data differs from standard activity sync and requires custom configuration.

Coaching Workflows: Flag calls meeting certain criteria (long duration, specific keywords, conversion outcomes) for manager review. This creates a systematic approach to capturing voice of customer insights.

Content Development: Aggregate common objections and questions across calls to inform marketing content and sales enablement materials. When prospects repeatedly ask about specific capabilities or concerns, that signals content gaps.

Reporting and Optimization

Phone performance requires different metrics than email. Build reporting that captures both efficiency (dials, connects) and effectiveness (conversations, outcomes).

Core Phone Metrics

Diagnosing Performance Issues

When phone metrics underperform, the diagnosis tree typically follows this pattern:

Low connect rates (under 5%): Check data quality, caller ID reputation, and calling time windows. Also verify that sequences are targeting appropriate personas—calling C-level executives yields lower connect rates than director-level contacts.

Low conversation-to-meeting rates (under 15%): Listen to call recordings to assess messaging effectiveness. Review whether reps have adequate context before calls. The AI-assisted call preparation capabilities available today should eliminate guesswork about prospect context.

High wrong number rates (over 10%): Your data sources need attention. Implement phone verification before prospects enter sequences, and track wrong number rates by source to identify problematic providers.

Compliance and Best Practices

Phone outreach carries regulatory requirements that vary by jurisdiction. GTM Engineers must build compliant infrastructure from the start.

Key Compliance Areas

Building Sustainable Phone Programs

Beyond compliance minimums, sustainable phone programs balance efficiency with prospect experience. Excessive calling without new value signals creates negative brand impressions. Integrate phone touchpoints within properly tested sequences that respect prospect time.

Monitor for signs of list fatigue: declining connect rates over time, increasing negative responses, and spam reports. Rotate targeting criteria and messaging regularly. The maintenance workflows for phone programs parallel those for email but require attention to different health indicators.

Advanced Integration Patterns

For GTM Engineers building sophisticated sales engagement systems, phone data integrates with broader automation workflows in powerful ways.

Trigger-Based Calling

Move beyond static call lists to event-triggered calling. When prospects exhibit high-intent signals (pricing page visits, demo requests, feature exploration), immediately surface them in calling queues. The webhook-based triggers powering your email workflows apply equally to phone prioritization.

Call Outcome Automation

Different call dispositions should trigger different downstream actions. Configure automation rules like:

• Meeting Booked: Pause sequence, create opportunity, notify AE
• Not Interested: Mark as disqualified, add to nurture track
• Referred to Colleague: Create new contact, add to sequence with referral context
• Timing Issue: Schedule callback task, adjust sequence timing

This connects to the broader architecture of confidence-weighted sequencing where call outcomes update prospect scoring and routing.

Multi-System Context Assembly

The most effective phone conversations draw context from multiple systems: CRM history, marketing engagement, product usage signals, and enrichment data. Assembling this context in real-time as calls connect requires integration infrastructure that goes beyond Outreach's native capabilities.

Context engines like Octave serve this exact purpose, aggregating signals across your GTM stack and surfacing relevant context precisely when reps need it. This transforms cold calls into warm conversations where reps demonstrate genuine understanding of the prospect's situation.

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