Network building strategies

CTD's value grows with the size and quality of your network. The more data each person on your team contributes, the more warm paths your whole organization can find. Business Edition gives you two levers to pull: enriching your team's individual networks, and inviting external members.

Enrich your team's individual networks

Beyond the work email accounts your admin provisions, each team member can voluntarily add their own data sources. Every addition expands the team's collective reach.

Personal email accounts

Team members can connect a personal Gmail or Outlook account at app.ctd.ai/accounts. This surfaces connections that live outside their work inbox — contacts from previous roles, personal relationships, and networks built before joining the company. It's self-serve, optional, and controlled entirely by the individual.

See Add a personal email account for step-by-step instructions.

LinkedIn connections and messages

LinkedIn is often where your team's strongest relationships live — connections who haven't sent each other a work email in years but would still pick up the phone. Team members can import their LinkedIn connections and message history via LinkedIn's data export.

• Connections — adds everyone they're connected with on LinkedIn to their CTD network, even people they've never emailed
• Messages — lets CTD score the strength of LinkedIn relationships, not just that a connection exists

See Import LinkedIn connections and Import LinkedIn messages for the full walkthrough.

Invite external members

External members are people outside your organization — advisors, investors, partners, customer champions — who you invite to share their network with your team. External members are free and unlimited on Business Edition.

How it works

When someone accepts an external member invitation and adds their network data, two things happen simultaneously: your team gains access to warm paths through their contacts, and they gain access to warm paths through your team's collective network. It's a mutual exchange built on trust — they choose what they're comfortable sharing (email account, LinkedIn connections, or both).

Who makes a good external member

• Board members and advisors — senior networks and a direct stake in your success
• Investors — VCs and angels who want to see you win
• Strategic partners — channel partners, integration partners, co-sell relationships
• Customer champions — customers who love your product and are willing to make introductions
• Referral partners — anyone in a formal or informal referral program

For VC and PE firms, the best external members are founders and executives of portfolio companies. Their networks are extensive, they benefit from being connected to your firm's network, and introductions between portfolio companies create compounding value over time.

What external members get out of it

External members receive a free CTD account — not just access to your network, but CTD as a personal tool: all their contacts organized and scored in one place, warm path search for their own goals, job change alerts, and the mobile app. For advisors and investors, this is genuinely useful on its own, which makes the invitation easy to accept.

See What you get by joining as an external member — a page written for the person you're inviting, which you can share directly with them.

Inviting external members

Go to Settings → External members → Invite and enter their email. They'll receive an invitation, create a free account, and add their network data. Once connected, their network is automatically incorporated into your workspace.

See Inviting external members for the full flow, and What are external members? for a deeper explanation of how the relationship works.

Team email template

Once CTD is live, send this to your team to explain why adding accounts matters and make it easy for them to act. Personalize the parts in brackets.