Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Employee Network?

We've spent years studying what separates top-performing sales teams from the rest, and one insight keeps surfacing: the deals that close fastest almost always start with a warm introduction.

Here's what the data tells us. Cold outreach to enterprise decision-makers converts at roughly 1-2%. Warm introductions? They lift meeting rates to 40-60%. That's not a marginal improvement—it's a fundamental shift in how pipelines get built.

**The Relationship Gap in B2B Sales**

Most sales organizations sit on a goldmine they don't even know exists. Your executive leadership team, board members, advisors, and customer champions collectively know thousands of decision-makers at your target accounts. But without a systematic way to map and activate those relationships, they remain invisible.

We call this the relationship gap—the space between the connections your organization has and the connections your sales team can actually leverage.

**Three Truths About Executive-Level Access**

After working with hundreds of enterprise sales teams, we've observed some consistent patterns:

**Truth #1: Multi-Threading Matters More Than Ever**
Single-threaded deals are fragile. When your only champion leaves, gets reassigned, or loses political capital, your opportunity evaporates. Research shows that deals with connections to 3+ personas inside an account have 47% higher win rates and close 33% faster.

**Truth #2: Timing Beats Persistence**
Sales reps often spend months nurturing cold leads when a warm path existed all along. The VP you've been cold-emailing? Your board advisor worked with her for six years. That introduction gets you a meeting this week, not next quarter.

**Truth #3: Champions Need Activation, Not Just Identification**
Customer success teams know who the champions are. But champions don't automatically drive expansion revenue. They need to be strategically engaged at the right moments—renewal discussions, upsell opportunities, executive business reviews—with the right people from your team.

**What This Means for Your Sales Motion**

The shift from cold outreach to relationship-powered pipeline generation requires three things:

First, visibility into who in your extended network knows whom at target accounts. Not just direct connections, but second and third-degree paths that unlock executive access.

Second, operationalization of those insights. Relationship intelligence only matters if your sales team can act on it—requesting introductions, coordinating multi-threaded outreach, and tracking which paths are most effective.

Third, governance and measurement. Executive time is precious. You need to ensure introduction requests are qualified, track conversion rates, and demonstrate ROI on relationship-powered pipeline.

**Putting It Into Practice**

Over the next 30 days, try this experiment: Before your team reaches out cold to any new target account, pause and ask: "Who in our organization might already know someone there?"

Check with your executives, board members, advisors, and long-time customers. Map the connections manually if you have to. We've seen teams uncover warm paths to 30-40% of their target account list just by asking.

The results speak for themselves. Lower customer acquisition costs. Shorter sales cycles. Higher win rates. Better expansion and retention metrics.

It's not about working harder. It's about working smarter—leveraging the relationships you've already built to open doors that would otherwise stay closed.

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Of course, you could also just use Connect The Dots and roll it out across your entire company.

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