--- title: "How a two-rep sales floor sent 165,000 texts and made 19,000 calls in eight weeks" description: "The real numbers from the floor TalaLevel was built on: 165,000 texts, 19,000 calls, 911 AI-held conversations for $110, and what it cost to run." url: https://talalevel.com/blog/two-rep-floor-165000-texts-19000-calls/ date: 2026-11-10 updated: 2026-11-10 --- # How a two-rep sales floor sent 165,000 texts and made 19,000 calls in eight weeks I built TalaLevel for my own outbound floor before anyone else could buy it. In about eight weeks, two of us used it to send 164,881 texts, make 18,933 calls and let its AI hold 911 text conversations for $110 in total, answering in under two minutes at any hour. A month of calling cost about $18 in line charges. I didn't build TalaLevel to sell it. I run a small outbound floor, two of us calling and texting business owners across the US, and I do it from Madrid. So when a lead texts back at 8pm their time, it's 3am for me. The tools I was paying for couldn't fix that, so I started building my own, one mistake at a time. Everything below comes straight out of our own database. Nothing is rounded up. I'm putting the weak spots in too, because that's the part I wish someone had shown me. ## The eight weeks in numbers | | | |---|---| | Texts sent | 164,881 | | Texts that came back | 11,546 | | Calls made | 18,933 | | Calls placed by the AI caller | 8,120 | | Hours on the phone | 87 | | Text conversations held by the AI | 911 | | What the AI cost for all of them | $109.44 | | People | 2 | Texts are counted from September 15 and calls from September 3, both to November 8, 2026. ## Two people can't answer 11,546 texts This was the first wall we hit. A reply at 9:40 at night is a live lead for about ten minutes. By the time I woke up it was a stranger again, and I was paying for leads I never talked to. So I put an AI on the replies. It reads the whole thread and what we know about the lead, writes an answer, checks its own draft, and sends it. When a reply needs a person, it stops and hands the conversation to one of us with a note. What it did in those weeks: - **911 conversations**, start to finish or until one of us took over. - **Under two minutes to reply.** The median was 112 seconds on one list and 84 on the other. - **About one in five** of the texts it answered came in at night or on a Sunday. - **2,307 of its 4,840 texts got an answer back.** People kept talking to it. - **52 stops**, about 1% of what it sent. - **532 hand-overs** to a person. This is the number I like most. It knows when it's out of its depth. All of it cost $109.44. That's about 12 cents a conversation. It also got things wrong, and I wrote those up separately in [every mistake it made](https://talalevel.com/blog/ai-answered-900-sales-conversations/). The short version: I changed one sentence in its instructions and that night it misbehaved in hundreds of threads. Now every change gets replayed on old conversations before it goes live. ## 19,000 calls without a room full of callers We dial from a list, one lead after the next, with the lead's history on the screen. A live assistant listens to the call and puts one line in front of you when the lead pushes back. One line, not a paragraph. You can't read a paragraph while someone is talking to you. For the lists neither of us has time for, an AI caller dials. It placed 8,120 of the 18,933 calls, on lists we set running, and every one of those was recorded and reviewed like one of ours. The thing that surprised me most is what calling costs. In the last 30 days we measured, 9,490 calls and 2,564 minutes of talk came to about $18 in line charges. Calls are billed by the second, so a ring with no answer costs almost nothing. The minutes were never the expensive part. The people were. ## What I was about to pay instead Before this, my plan was a dialer and a separate texting tool. As of November 2026 a dialer seat lists at around $119 a month and a texting tool at around $199 a month before per-text fees. That's over $300 a seat, with calls in one place, texts in another, and still nobody answering at night. That's why TalaLevel starts at $47 a seat a month, with calls, texts, email and the AI on the same lead. I priced it at what I wanted to pay. ## If you run a small floor, steal these You don't need my software for any of this. 1. **Measure your reply time at night.** Pull last month's inbound texts, look at the ones that came after 6pm, and check when each got an answer. That gap is where your leads go. 2. **Put calls and texts on one record.** Whoever calls should see what the lead texted an hour ago. If they can't, your reps are opening every call blind. 3. **If you put an AI on replies, let it hand over.** Give it one goal per conversation and a way to stop. The 532 hand-overs are why the other conversations went well. 4. **Count conversations, not "answered".** Most of our "answered" calls were voicemail greetings. Count calls that last 30 seconds. 5. **Call back.** More than half our conversations came from a second, third or fourth call to the same lead. 6. **Test wording on a hundred numbers per carrier before a list gets it.** Carriers block words, not only numbers. The full list of what got us blocked is in [what 165,000 sales texts taught us](https://talalevel.com/blog/what-165000-sales-texts-taught-us/). The floor still runs on this every day, so these numbers are already out of date. I'll keep posting them, the bad ones too. ## Questions ### How many texts and calls can a two-person sales team handle with TalaLevel? On our own floor, two reps sent 164,881 texts and made 18,933 calls in about eight weeks. 8,120 of those dials were placed by the AI caller, and the AI held 911 of the text conversations. ### How much does it cost to have AI answer sales texts? On our floor the AI held 911 conversations for $109.44 in total, about 12 cents a conversation. ### How fast does the AI reply to a lead's text? The median reply took 112 seconds on one of our lists and 84 seconds on the other. About one in five of the texts it answered came in at night or on a Sunday. ### Do people opt out more when an AI is texting them? Not on our floor. Of 4,840 texts the AI sent, 52 were answered with a stop, about 1 percent, and 2,307 got a reply. ### What does calling cost on TalaLevel's own floor? In the last 30 days we measured, 9,490 calls and 2,564 minutes of talk cost about $18 in line charges, because calls are billed by the second. ### Does the AI ever hand a conversation to a person? Yes. It handed a conversation to a rep 532 times, whenever a reply needed a judgement call or its own draft failed its check.