Sales has always been a hard job. But these days, it’s getting even harder.
Competition is getting intense. Product categories are maturing, making incumbents harder to beat. Buyers are inundated with sales and marketing messages. It’s hard to reach people, hard to break through, and hard to build the momentum it takes to close a deal.
One of the foundational reasons we launched Connect The Dots was to make life easier for sellers. One of our biggest goals is to bring warmth and familiarity back to sales. Our platform analyzes relationships to show where connections between people are strong, which makes warm introductions much easier to get.
Sales is an obvious use case. One of our early adopters called us “the ultimate GTM shortcut.” We think they’re on to something. Referrals and introductions are a simple way to cut through the noise, speed up sales cycles and drive up conversion rate.
Let’s break down what it takes to experience this superpower and get an edge over your competition.
The first step is also the most important one: use Connect The Dots to build a relationship graph that maps your connections.
Connect The Dots analyzes email metadata to automatically create a list of who people know and how well they know each other. When coworkers join the platform using their work email, they’re automatically connected.
Find people within your organization who have good connections and are willing to share them with the sales team and have them create an account on the platform. Senior employees, leadership team, and co-founders are great. The graph is even better if board members, funders, partners, and advisors plug in. Once your team members' accounts are live, the graph is ready. There are no additional steps.
One key point to remember is that data is easy to update once it’s been added to Connect The Dots. For example, some of the team might have very strong relationships that aren’t reflected in the email accounts connected to the platform. It’s easy to go through your network in Connect The Dots and update relationship scores or other information.
When researching a target account, it’s incredibly common for sellers to open a LinkedIn company profile page and see who they know that works there.
Connect The Dots offers a free Chrome extension that overlays the data in our platform onto LinkedIn. The AE leading an account team just needs to open the drawer and they can immediately get two invaluable pieces of information:
Potential contacts are listed with a percentage score that indicates the likelihood of a successful introduction based on how well the individuals in the AE’s network know people connected to the company in question.
In a matter of seconds, sellers can see who the best people are to connect them to prospects at their target account.
If you’re using a Sales Engagement Platform like Outreach or Salesloft, this lightning-fast step can save a lot of time and frustration. When a close contact has a strong relationship with a prospect, sellers can reach out and ask for an introduction or for valuable information that makes outreach more relevant and personalized.
This can become a simple day-to-day research task, but it’s also a valuable input for account planning. Some Connect The Dots users go as far as using the platform to assign territories, matching AEs with geographies and verticals where they have the best connections.
To be clear, Connect The Dots isn’t a CRM or a replacement for your sales engagement platform. It’s a simple ingredient that makes the entire sales process more effective.
Anyone selling to enterprise companies knows that multithreading is the most important thing you can do to drive deals to close and increase your win rate.
Reaching the buying committee and key stakeholders can be incredibly difficult. Connect The Dots makes it easy to find the best connections to the people influencing a deal, and the motion is essentially the same as the research step described above.
Just find an individual profile page on LinkedIn, open the Connect The Dots drawer, and you can see the best connections and potential connections to reach the person you’re looking at.
It’s that simple.
If you lead a sales team, you know how hard it is to recruit top talent. And you also know that relationships are the most precious asset to every seller’s career.
Companies often hire senior sales talent based on who job candidates know. Someone with strong relationships in a key vertical or region will always be an attractive hire.
Connect The Dots functions as a contact database (we often call it a relationship bank) that automatically grows along with each user’s career. Companies that invest in Connect The Dots for their teams aren’t just building an enterprise relationship graph. They’re giving individuals a valuable source of data on their relationships.
Our business edition includes controls on what Connect The Dots users can or can’t take with them when they move to a new job. But we strongly recommend allowing users to transition their relationship data. When a Connect The Dots user changes jobs and their email is shut off, at the very most they would have a record of who they were in touch with, contact information for those people, and the subject lines of emails. That’s it.
For sales managers, letting team members know that they can transition relationship data is a powerful message that you’re invested in their careers. It’s a gracious move, but also a smart one that will earn your team’s respect and keep them engaged.
We often get asked if Connect The Dots integrates with Salesforce, Outreach or other common sales tools. We have a number of integrations in our product pipeline, and will eventually offer an API that makes platform data even more useful, but at the moment we’re laser focused on LinkedIn to be sure our platform is useful exactly when sales teams need it most.
Keep an eye on this blog for more announcements about integrations. They’re coming.
