https://talalevel.com/blog/ Posts from the team behind TalaLevel on sales texting, calling and follow-up. en-us Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://talalevel.com/blog/10dlc-registration-guide/https://talalevel.com/blog/10dlc-registration-guide/Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTTo text from an ordinary US number, a business registers twice: the business itself, then what it texts. At cost that is $4.50 to verify the business, $15 for each review of the texts, and from $2 a month for the campaign, with three months paid up front. The business check takes minutes. The review of the texts usually takes one to two weeks, and it is where applications get sent back, mostly over how people agreed to be texted and one sentence missing from the privacy page. https://talalevel.com/blog/new-cold-caller-first-two-weeks/https://talalevel.com/blog/new-cold-caller-first-two-weeks/Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTExpect a person to pick up about 6 or 7 calls in 100. Call every lead four times over about ten days, try every number on the lead, start each day with yesterday's no-answers, and count the people reached, not the calls your dialer marks as answered. These are the numbers from over 20,000 of our own calls to business owners in the past three months. https://talalevel.com/blog/how-many-times-to-call-a-lead/https://talalevel.com/blog/how-many-times-to-call-a-lead/Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTCall at least four times. On our floor a first call got a person 6.2% of the time, and the second, third and fourth calls to leads we still hadn't reached got 6.4%, 5.5% and 6.9%. Calling back took us from 6.2% of leads reached to 10.7%. From the fifth call it fell to about 3%. https://talalevel.com/blog/best-power-dialers/https://talalevel.com/blog/best-power-dialers/Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTTalaLevel is the most cost-effective power dialer for a team calling the US: $47 a seat a month for a power dialer with unlimited US calling and the CRM included, or $97 for three lines at once plus texting, with no seat minimum and no demo call. CloudTalk and Skipcall cost less a seat for parallel dialing if you already pay for a CRM somewhere else. PhoneBurner, Aircall and Ringover cost more a seat, JustCall's power dialer is $69 with a two-seat minimum and no CRM, and Orum, Nooks, Kixie and Koncert don't publish prices. https://talalevel.com/blog/best-time-to-cold-call-business-owners/https://talalevel.com/blog/best-time-to-cold-call-business-owners/Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTOn our floor the hour mattered much less than the usual advice says. A person answered about 7% of our calls in every hour from 9am to 5pm, in their own time. Friday was our best day at 10.4% and Saturday the worst at 4.4%. Our first count said 5pm and Saturday were far ahead, but that count was treating voicemails and call screeners as conversations. https://talalevel.com/blog/two-rep-floor-165000-texts-19000-calls/https://talalevel.com/blog/two-rep-floor-165000-texts-19000-calls/Tue, 10 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTI 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. https://talalevel.com/blog/what-165000-sales-texts-taught-us/https://talalevel.com/blog/what-165000-sales-texts-taught-us/Sun, 08 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTCarriers block words, not just numbers: asking for "a number" or an "amount", or using the word "underwriter", got our texts blocked, so test new wording on about 100 numbers per carrier and check T-Mobile and Verizon separately. A reply isn't interest and "who is this?" isn't a no: count interest by reading the threads, and answer in minutes, in the lead's time zone. https://talalevel.com/blog/ai-answered-900-sales-conversations/https://talalevel.com/blog/ai-answered-900-sales-conversations/Sun, 08 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTAn AI that answers warm leads' texts held 911 conversations in its first 6 weeks, with a median reply under 2 minutes and a total AI bill of about $110. It waits a minute or two before answering, has one goal per conversation, checks every number before a text goes out, knows when to say nothing, hands anything hot, weird or angry to a person and never pretends to be a person.