Velu is a UK consulting agency that grows local businesses through outbound cold calling. But on Aircall and Ringover, calls kept dropping and pickup rates stalled at 20-30%, making it hard to scale outreach or train new reps. After switching to CloudTalk, Velu nearly doubled its pickup rate to 40-50%, cut dropped calls, and onboarded new SDRs faster. The result: a lean team building a repeatable outbound engine from day one.
About Velu
Velu is a UK-based consulting agency that helps local businesses grow. Outbound cold calling sits at the center of how they win clients, so the phone isn’t a side channel — it’s the business.
The team is lean and early-stage, building its sales motion from the ground up. Every tool has to be reliable out of the box and simple enough for a new rep to learn fast.
Challenge
When Most of Your Cold Calls Never Connect
Velu’s growth plan ran on outbound volume. The tools they started with couldn’t keep up. On Aircall and Ringover, calls dropped and pickup rates sat at 20-30% — even in prime calling windows.
We were using Aircall and Ringover before, and the calls just kept dropping. The pickup rate was somewhere around 20-30%, even during ideal calling hours.
The instability did more than cost connections. It made the team hard to scale. New reps were ramping on tools that were neither reliable nor simple, turning onboarding into a bottleneck.
Evaluation
A Cleaner Interface, and Faster Onboarding
Velu went looking for an outbound platform that could lift pickup rates, simplify number rotation, and fit the stack they already ran. CloudTalk’s value showed up on day one: setup was quick and the interface was easy to learn.
The interface stood out right away. It was simple to navigate, easy to train others on, and just smooth all around.
It also dropped into their existing workflow without friction, connecting to Zapier and Monday.com so outreach data moved across tools automatically.
Solution
Building a Repeatable Outbound Engine
Velu runs CloudTalk as the engine for outbound cold calling, with a lean stack around it: Google Sheets for lead lists, Monday.com for lead and project management, and Zapier for email automation.
Inside CloudTalk, four features do the heavy lifting:
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Click to Call for rapid outbound dialing
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Number rotation to keep caller IDs fresh and avoid burnout
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Call Tags to track each lead’s stage in the funnel
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Dashboards for live visibility into rep performance
We use the tag feature a lot to track where leads are in the funnel. And the dashboard helps each rep see where they’re at.
Results
Pickup Rates Up, Drop-offs Down
We were stuck at a 20-30% pickup rate with Aircall. With CloudTalk, we’ve hit 40-50%. That’s made all the difference.
Pickup rates climbed from 20-30% to 40-50% — close to double the connections from the same effort. Dropped calls and abandonment fell. New SDRs ramp faster on an interface they can actually learn, and managers finally have live visibility into rep performance. For a lean team, that efficiency is what keeps pipelines full and reps motivated.
Takeaway
For Velu, CloudTalk isn’t just a dialer — it’s the foundation of a sales process they can scale. With pickup rates up and onboarding simplified, the team is now looking to expand outreach beyond the UK, adding AI once their human-led process is fully in place.
