My Personal Playbook: Leveraging Networks To Close Your Pipeline Gaps
The GTM Newsletter
I’m a sales guy.
Always have been, always will be.
The focus of my career has always been on: building pipeline and closing revenue (in all sorts of various forms).
I was catching up with a close friend that I’ve known for years and she said:
“Huh? I always thought you ran Marketing at Sales Hacker? And that you were like the content/evangelist guy at Outreach?”
It wasn’t true but I took it as a compliment.
In reality, once I joined Sales Hacker, I actually closed just about every deal that came in the door (we were a multi-million dollar/year business and remained profitably through the acquisition).
And I did hold the title of ‘Evangelist’ for a little while at Outreach but what did that actually mean? Enterprise pipe creation, partnerships (that drove revenue) and sales.
I learned early on that applying the tactics and strategies that Marketing team’s used to drive eyeballs/attention would help me as a sales leader build my own network and drive my own demand.
Sure - I hosted two webinars a week for two years, hosted the Sales Engagement Podcast, created daily content on LinkedIn, hosted dinners across the globe and planned conferences/retreats.
But the KPI’s were never likes, comments, butts-in-seats at events or views.
The goal was simple: drive net new revenue and grow existing accounts.
It was about building networks, providing as much value to that network as possible and then finding strategic ways to turn that value into hard revenue.
Often, in this newsletter, I speak through other leaders and try to make it actionable for readers.
Today, I’m going to share some stories/strategies from my personal Playbook.
When I look around, I see lots of companies struggling to hit their pipeline goals right now and most teams struggling to turn their valuable networks into revenue.
Below, I’ll try to share some ideas that helped me bridge that $ gap.
Anyway, let’s get into it.
My Personal Playbook: Leveraging Networks To Close Your Pipeline Gaps
“How did we lose this deal? The COO was in my f**king wedding party?”
That line stuck in my head.
I was still running revenue at Sales Hacker post-acquisition and helping us turn our Outreach conference into a ‘revenue driver’ vs ‘a cost center’ at the time.
But when I heard this sentence on a big Enterprise deal post-mortem meeting, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I realized that we were scaling so quickly and everyone was so hyper-focused on their day-to-day that their wasn’t a whole lot of people looking at the whole picture.
Who was connecting the dots across our entire organization and our outside network of VCs, Board of Directors, Influencers, our friendly ‘thought-leaders’ and broader community?
So I came up with a framework, hired/trained someone to take over my current functions (shout-out Mikey Harrison for crushing it) and created a new role for myself.
I wanted to be focused on the #1 objective across the company (at the time): building pipeline, increasing deal velocity and closing new Enterprise Logos.
I wanted to connect the dots that others were too busy to see and I never wanted us to lose a deal again because we didn’t bring in the right people who already had existing relationship.
The dormant networks just sitting in tech. companies is incredibly powerful.
Here is roughly how it worked:
First step:
We needed everyone across the organization to be looking at the same Enterprise/Strategic target accounts. We worked with Demand Gen. and Rev Ops to create a dynamic list of our top 100 accounts we were either trying to break into or increase our footprint at.
Second step:
Take that list, put it in a google sheet and map out all relationship/points of entry across our top 25 most connected leaders internally, our VCs, our BoDs and outside community members/influencers who were friendlies to Outreach. I used virtual assistants overseas to scrape everyone’s LinkedIn connections.
Third step:
Set up meetings with all leaders, VC firms and BoDs, external influencer to review the target accounts and see if these were, in fact, strong relationships. Do as much of the heavy-lifting for them as you can (these are busy people).
Fourth step:
Once that’s all mapped out, prioritize the list by ‘size of prize’ and begin to take action. Get with the AE who owns the account, understand the full context of the account and come up with a plan. Are we using this connection to ask for a direct intro to a commercial discussion? Are we going to get them to invite them to an upcoming dinner? Are we going to invite them on our podcast?
Fifth step:
Share all the account context with the executive who has the relationship, share the plan of attack and provide them with a ghost-written template to make it as simple as hitting ‘send’. These are highly valuable relationships that require a ‘white-glove’ approach the whole way. We had the Former Chairman of AT&T on our board and VCs from Tier 1 firms like Sequoia …make sure they know that they have one, single point of contact to make execution easy (you don’t want all SDRs/AEs harassing them as it will quickly become too noisy/they will ignore asks).
Sixth step:
Once the introduction has been made, it’s on the AE to ensure that the deal progresses but keep the original intro maker in the loop with any positive movement on the account and use them again to help unstick deals that lose momentum. Make a big deal of any wins that come from these introductions to create a success feedback loop which will get everyone leaning in more to the program.
Seventh step:
This part is key. If done well, eventually you’ll exhaust most point of entries into target accounts so how do you make sure this program can scale? Well this program is about extracting value from existing networks so you have to make sure everyone is taking time to grow their existing network (well before they need it). You need to think 3-4 quarters out. We taught members of the ELT team how to create content on LinkedIn to expand their reach, we invited future champions to digital roundtables/events, we collaborated with leaders at future target accounts on content for the blog/podcast to get them into our web and found ways to make connections that didn’t immediately involve a commercial discussion.
This program resulted in hundred of millions in pipeline, helped us increase deal velocity dramatically, win highly competitive deals and close some of our largest accounts.
And it was all just sitting there: waiting to be unlocked.
📈 How to take action/learnings:
Align on a dynamic target account list across the entire org.
Map our all existing relationships internally/externally.
Prioritize that list based on ‘strength of relationship’ and ‘size of prize’.
Take action, get context, create a custom plan of attack for each and make the asks as simple, crisp and low-lift as possible.
Create a positive, success feedback loop to get folks leaning in.
Grow your ‘footprint of influence’ through content/events and build relationships well before you ever need them.
Repeat.
Bonus: since I built this, technology has caught up and a lot of this manual work can now be done directly in tools like Cabal.
Now that we got the entire org. marching to the same revenue drum beat and unlocking their networks, we wanted to keep the momentum going.
This next play is a fairly common one across SaaS companies but it had a big impact when we implemented it so I wanted to share it in case some leaders are not yet utilizing it.
We created a weekly “Big Deal Review Call”.
But instead of it just being between the AE and Sales leadership, we invited leaders from all across the organization: our CEO, COO, execs from Marketing/Sales/Support/Success/Pro-serve/Rev ops even Eng.
This is a weekly meeting where 2-3 Account Executives would present a big deal that they were working on or a big prospect account they were trying to break into.
The accounts would be sent out to meetings attendees ahead of time and they were expected to familiarize themselves with the account, look through their network and come to the table with ideas/strategies to help us win or break in.
The meeting was one hour in length.
Each AE would have 15mins to present a deck on where we stand in the account, plays we’ve run in the past, a full map of all champions/stakeholders and their asks.
We’d then all spend 15 mins brainstorming ideas, looking for points of entry and actionable next steps.
It was then on the AE to summarize everything in a post-meeting email with actions items for every leader that had an idea.
Keep the email thread open for communication and make sure that all items have been executed on until an opportunity was created or the deal was won.
This helped us win as a team and showed our AEs that the whole company was working for them - they were the quarterbacks and we were here to help them in any way that we could.
📈 How to take action/learnings:
Create a weekly “Big Deal Review” Meeting.
Invite 15-20 leaders across the organization to provide their own unique POVs.
Share presentations beforehand so leaders can come prepared.
Have AE present for 15mins and spent 15mins brainstorming actionable ways to progress the account forward.
Make sure the AE is summarizing action items and chasing them down to make sure nothing gets missed.
Keep alignment on an email thread and celebrate team wins.
Not every relationship that you unlock is ready for a commercial discussion.
Tech companies are inherently impatient, their org-wide incentive structure rewards short term thinking in quarters rather than years.
But I’m a firm believe that you need to have strategies for slowly bolstering relationships over time. People still buy from people and they need exposure to your company to understand what you stand for beyond the problem you solve.
Here more six more, longer-term networks plays from my personal bag of tricks that we ran successfully through this crazy four year time period:
The Podcast Play
We actually created The Sales Engagement Podcast as a tool for connectivity rather than a distribution engine (we had The Sales Hacker podcast for that). Funnily enough, it ended up also becoming the latter with over 500K total listens but that was never the point. It was a place where we could invite leaders from accounts we were trying to break into and build relationship in a non-threatening environment. If our SDRs weren’t able to create an opps after a few months, we would have someone that was loosely connected invite the stakeholder onto the podcast. Our hit rate was off the charts (70% took us up on it) and we were very rarely shut down. Everyone likes to share their story and the best part: their story would also unlock key items about the account. It was almost like doing live Discovery.
The Executive Industry Roundtable Play
C-suite level execs are harder to get to join podcasts. They are incredibly busy people. So we sat down and asked, what do our c-suite execs find time for? The answer was: networking with their peers. C-suite execs do find time to connect with other c-suite execs to share their learnings with each other and help each other level-up. So we took that and started to create industry-specific (FinServe, Insurance, Telecom) digital roundtables where we would invite 6-8 like-minded, c-suite operators together to talk about “The Future of Revenue Creation in x Industry” and we’d invite our matching internal C-suite to attend the call. There was no product pitch just a place where we could network, learn and build relationships.
The High-Touch Exec Dinner Play
This was typically used to continue to engage folks that had joined us on a digital roundtable. We found that if we invited folks cold to executive dinners they weren’t very likely to attend but if they had attended one of our digital roundtables (which is a much lower barrier to entry, no travel, etc.) they would take us up on it. They had gotten to know us a little bit and saw the value of being around peers. We would always make sure that we had 2-3 happy customers at these dinners that would sell on our behalf. Again, no product commercial or pitch at all but by this time they were naturally curious and we’d have 1 or 2 execs there to answers questions they had.
The Social Unstick Play
I don’t think I’ve shared this one publicly before but I’ve used it a bunch since the early Sales Hacker days. Many times, I’d have a deal on the 10 yard line and they’d go dark on me (or us). They wouldn’t respond to my emails or LinkedIn messages but I knew that I’d done the proper discovery and they were a good fit for our product/service. Out of desperation, I started thinking about the challenges we discussed and creating content that would help their problems. Basically teach them how to solve their problem themselves while showcasing how we could do it much easier. I’d then share that content on LinkedIn and then get a colleague, friend or employee at their company that I knew to tag the champion that I was trying to get back in touch with saying “@name - I thought you’d find this interesting” - low and behold 90% of them would get back to me the next day apologizing for going dark.
Pipeline Days
Full post here.
Linkedin Takeovers
Whenever we would have a big product launch, new feature or event - we would harness the collective power of our entire organization to get the word out. We’d send an email out a week before the takeover outlining the time, instructions and a few example posts. Then we’d ask every employee to post at the same time on LinkedIn. The most successful ones we ran were when we employees really made the posts their own and added their own unique flavor. Exp. we did a 90s dance party at Unleash one year so we asked everyone to share a picture of themselves form the 90s - it was fun and drove more than 2M impressions and 1000s of event sign-ups.
📈 How to take action/learnings:
Create a podcast with the aim of connectivity/connection instead of reach.
Build out a schedule of industry specific digital roundtables for C-suite execs.
Invite digital roundtables guests to in-person dinners with customers and your execs.
Use social media platforms to unstick deals.
Do a Pipeline Day once per quarter
Use ‘Linkedin Takeovers’ to harness the followings of all your employees.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
Very good read from Iconiq on “The data behind scaling a B2B SaaS business.”
👂More for your eardrums:
Max and I riff on everything GTM & VC in our monthly jam session. We talk through what we’re seeing in the market, the IPO backlog, how we set our goal, “parent hacking” and what do expect in 2023.
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
The CEO/Founder of Viable, Daniel Erickson was recently featured in article about how AI enables effective leadership in Forbes below. Keep your 👀 on Viable this year, they are harnessing the power of AE and GPT-3 to automate your quantitative data analysis.
🔥Hottest GTM job of the week:
Mid Market Account Executive at Vividly, more details here.
See more top GTM jobs here.
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That was a fun one to write.
I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed re-living some of those moments.
2023 will be the year of leveraging networks to do more with less, I hope these ideas spark some inspiration.
Thanks for rocking with me until the end.
Have a great weekend - see you all next week.
Barker.
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Thanks for sharing this, Scott. I also enjoyed your session yesterday. Great insights.