External members unlock some of CTD's most powerful workflows. Here are the use cases we see working best in practice.
1. Board meeting prep
You have a board meeting next month. Five board members will be in the room. Before the meeting, go into CTD and find the highest-value warm paths that each board member can unlock for you — senior targets, strategic accounts, people who are hard to reach through normal channels.
Pick the top five introductions you want to ask for. Walk into the board meeting with those specific asks ready. You don't have to do anything through CTD at that point — you've already done the research. You make the ask live, in the room, where it's easiest for them to say yes.
This works especially well for:
- Senior or C-level targets who don't respond to cold outreach
- Strategic deals you need to accelerate
- First conversations with someone important enough to warrant a personal intro from a board member
2. Replacing the manual board member GTM process
Board members are already expected to support their portfolio companies' go-to-market efforts — making introductions, opening doors, lending their network. But before CTD, this was painful for everyone involved.
The typical process: export the board member's LinkedIn connections to a CSV, share it in a Google Sheet, have the sales team manually tag relevant people, send it back to the board member, and ask them to identify who they actually know well enough to make an intro. A lot of back-and-forth, a lot of noise, and a lot of LinkedIn connections that the board member has no real relationship with.
CTD replaces this entirely. Relationship scores are built from multiple signals:
- LinkedIn connections and messages
- Email metadata — who they've emailed, how recently, how often, and whether it's two-way
- Publicly available data — whether they worked or studied together
This means CTD can tell you not just who the board member is connected to, but who they actually know. And because CTD is connected to your CRM, it can automatically match their real relationships against the companies and people that are relevant to you — surfacing the highest-value paths without any manual work.
Once a board member is connected as an external member, the Google Sheets process is over. CTD handles the matching and surfaces the right introductions automatically.
3. Founder-to-founder network for VC firms
Many VC firms have a deliberate motion where founders help other founders — through events, introductions, shared resources, and peer networks. CTD makes this scalable.
By inviting founders and executives from all portfolio companies as external members, a VC firm can consolidate every founder's network into one shared graph. The result is a single, searchable network that spans the entire portfolio — so when a founder needs a warm introduction to a potential enterprise customer, a key hire, or a strategic partner, they can find the path through any other founder in the portfolio, not just their own connections.
CTD facilitates the introductions between and through portfolio founders, turning what was previously an informal, ad hoc process — "do you know anyone at X?" — into a structured, high-quality network that compounds in value as more founders join.
4. Customer champions
If you run a customer advocacy or referral program, your customer champions are among the best candidates for external members. They're already incentivized to help you — that's the nature of the program — which means the chance they accept the invitation and actively engage is significantly higher than a cold ask.
Once they're connected, the value is mutual. They get access to your network and can proactively find paths to people relevant to their own business. And you can make specific, targeted intro requests through them — to prospects, partners, or anyone else in their network — knowing the relationship and the incentive are already there.
5. Partners
Strategic partners are another strong fit for external membership. The partnership itself creates aligned incentives — they want you to succeed because it benefits them too — so they're naturally more willing to make introductions on your behalf than a cold connection would be.
Inviting partners as external members gives your team direct visibility into their network and a structured way to make intro requests through them. Instead of emailing a partner contact and asking "do you know anyone at X?", your team can find the specific path in CTD and make a precise ask — which is easier for the partner to act on and more likely to result in a quality introduction.