Drew Sechrist was on a Podcast with Scott Barker, co-founder of The GTMFund, and the former Director of Strategic Engagement at Outreach.
It's one of those episodes where they both have terrific stories, so it's hard to tell who's interviewing who!
When Scott was at Outreach, his job was to find the best entry points into their top accounts. They'd tap VCs, board of directors, advisors, good partners, and their bench of internal execs.
He said, "We are all running so fast to get to our number that no one is looking at the strength and power of the dormant relationships sitting in a thousand-person company, god forbid, a 10,000-person company. The exponential nature of that network is absurd."
Scott points out that with these networks like LinkedIn, the emphasis was to grow your connections. But now, there is so much noise, we can't make sense of it. Scott thinks the next evolution will be understanding the network around you and taking action.
Listeners to the GTM Podcast know why Scott is excited and passionate about this topic. The program he created at Outreach was extremely effective, generating hundreds of millions in pipeline. They had a low-tech approach with google sheets and a top 100 account list. They’d scrape the LinkedIn connections for their connectors, using VAs in the Philippines to augment the data, and then get their connectors to score relationships manually. It was a big exercise that required full company buy-in. All of that, which sounds like a lot of work, was an incredibly impactful exercise, and how they closed some of their most significant accounts. It was always wild to him that more people weren't doing something similar.
To illustrate the point of companies not connecting the dots, Scott tells a story about a postmortem on a deal they lost. He said one of the executives lost their mind. "How was I not brought into this deal? This decision-maker was the best man at my wedding!" The reality is, in most organizations, there is not one person who sees it all. Who's to blame for not connecting the dots? The executive, the AE, the BDR?
Drew explains this is just the problem we're working to solve at Connect The Dots. We're building a platform that does all of that automatically.
In the interview, Drew explains that we've experimented with the Sales Ambassador role. You learn the specific skillset of these more senior account executives, but the very specific thing is how do we leverage these relationships? How do we map out these relationships, understand them, and make the appropriate asks? Nobody wants the SDR to be the person who says, "Hey, Chairman of AT&T, could you introduce me, the SDR, to the CEO?" That's nonsense, right?!? The chairman at AT&T and the Partner at Sequoia don't want to feel like an SDR working for an AE. They want the ultimate white-gloved experience. Asks are vetted, and it's a good request, and it will be a good use of my time. They don't want it to come from 50 different AEs or 50 BDRs, all with different requests. In that scenario, your Superconnectors will tune out, and the whole thing will collapse. So how do you manage that?
Without being too self-serving, Drew explains how we built Connect The Dots to solve this problem. He describes how we build 3rd-degree to solve the visibility correctly, protecting people's privacy while setting up good asks. And Drew explains the ghost email feature, which makes it dead simple for the executives to review and edit requests in less than a minute. We've thought about this in a lot of detail from every side.
Scott said that he'd play this thought experiment. He said anyone running this play needs to understand that you only become CEO, or Chairman, with an intimate understanding of the dollar value of these relationships. They treat them like gold and have cultivated them, in some cases, over two decades. So if you're coming with a 3-line email saying, "Intro me please," you're asking them to debit $10,000 from their relationship bank with this person and fly in blind. So it's essential to take the time to do a crisp ask, make sure you're introducing power to more power, don't ask for a direct introduction, and give them the context. If you ask them to debit $10,000 of relationship capital, you must build the business case and make it simple. If you're not doing that, they're going to ignore it.
To tie onto that, Drew said that when teeing up an email for Marc Benioff, the email had to be short, like 3-4 sentences. And sometimes those 3-4 sentences for a big deal will take 3-4 days to write. You need to do that because it will be impactful if you get it right. And you've got to think about how much political capital you've got with the person you're asking. You want them to look good. You want them to feel good about you. That's all got to be correct.
Scott also touches on what these programs look like at scale. At some point, you learn that there are times when it's not appropriate to make the ask and immediately start a commercial discussion. You've got to look 4-quarters out and work with marketers on executive roundtables and tailored high-end dinners. You've got to layer on different programs, like inviting them to be interviewed on a podcast that elevates their brand. These are the things you do to cultivate the relationship.
There are so many good best practices in this podcast. If you set up an ambassador program, it's worth a listen to the full episodes. Thanks to Scott for having Drew on the episode and for all the excellent best practices from living this role first-hand!
