Bad Data Is Breaking Your Pipeline
Cold Call Benchmarks for May 12–18, 2025
You can't coach your way out of calling the wrong people.
🚀 Weekly Snapshot
📊 Team Totals (Last 7 Days):
Dials: 164,331
Connects: 11,685 (7.11%)
Conversations: 3,343 (28.60% of connects)
Meetings Set: 413 (12.35% of convos)
Avg. Meeting Call Time: 273.4 sec
Power Dial Connect Rate: 7.47%
Parallel Dial Connect Rate: 5.7%
📉 But here’s the real story:
Of the 11,685 people reps reached last week…
10.12% said “Wrong Contact”
5.98% were “Bad Number”
4.51% were “No Longer With Company”
That’s 2,400+ connects instantly wasted.
That’s not a rep problem. That’s a data problem.
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🧨 Key Trend: Connect ≠ Progress
Let’s kill the myth: just because you got a connect doesn’t mean you’re progressing pipeline.
Reps were fired up — they got a live human on the line — but then:
❌ It was the wrong person.
❌ The number was a placeholder.
❌ The contact had left 6 months ago.
That’s ~1 in every 5 live connects being a dead end.
And when 92%+ of dials already go unanswered, wasting the 8% that do is… pipeline sabotage.
🧠 Sales Manager Reality Check
Imagine this:
Your SDR books 1 meeting every ~398 dials.
But 20% of their connects — their hard-earned wins — are literal junk.
No script fixes that.
No A/B test saves that.
No pep talk un-wastes that hour.
Your reps are showing up. They’re dialing. They’re pushing.
But if the data is bad? You’re bleeding time, morale, and budget.
📉 Efficiency Leak: The Hidden Cost of Bad Data
Here’s what that looks like in hard numbers:
Time spent per junk connect: ~2 minutes (avg)
Junk connects this week: ~2,400
Hours lost: ~80
SDR cost/hour: $35 (avg blended rate)
Weekly burn: $2,800+
Monthly cost: $11,000+
And this is before you factor in opportunity cost — all the good prospects those reps didn’t reach while chasing ghosts.
🔧 Tactical Fix: Pre-Call Data Confidence
Here’s what top-performing teams do differently:
✅ Phone validation before sequencing
→ If the number isn’t verified within 60 days, flag it. Enrich or drop.
✅ Role + Intent match before call
→ Wrong contact = wrong conversation = wasted rep time.
✅ Use disposition data for feedback loops
→ “Wrong Contact,” “Bad Number,” and “No Longer at Company” should route back to marketing and ops for list cleansing — weekly.
Implement the “Call Confidence Score”:
Score every lead on:
Phone validity
Job role alignment
Recent engagement
Only call what passes the bar.
💡 Quick Win: Stop Auto-Sequencing Junk
Too many teams treat their CRM like a vending machine: dump a list in, hope meetings pop out.
🔁 Instead, create a “Data Quality Gate”:
Before prospects hit the dialer or SEP, check:
Has the contact changed jobs in last 3 months?
Is this the best phone number based on enrichment tools (ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clay, etc)?
Are we calling the right persona, or just someone with a job title that sounds close enough?
Bad data gets caught here. Not on call 17 of the day.
📣 Quote of the Week
“We don’t need more dials. We need fewer ghosts.”
— SDR Manager after realizing 19% of connects were junk
✅ Action Step: Launch a “Junk Data Sweep”
By Friday, do this:
Pull every disposition marked “Wrong Contact,” “Bad Number,” or “No Longer With Company.”
Tag these in your CRM.
Push for enrichment (or purge).
Report the % weekly — and show how meeting rates climb as junk rates drop.
Target: Get total “junk connects” under 12% in 30 days.
🧠 Final Thought
Every SDR starts the day with a finite number of calls.
If 1 in 5 connects is a dead number or the wrong person,
they’re not cold calling — they’re ghost hunting.
Clean data = real conversations = pipeline.
Everything else is noise.