The Impact of GTN

GTN leads to better, more efficient revenue

• 🦕 Buyers are 5X more likely to engage with a salesperson via a warm introduction versus a cold call
• 🦕 Deals sources from warm intros/referrals close at 50-70% (compared to 10-30% from cold outreach) (source)
• 🦕 Customers from warm intros or referrals have a 37% higher customer retention rate (source)
• 🦕 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision (source)
• 🦕 Warm intros/referrals are by far the highest converting sales channel at 72.3% (Lead forensics)

Why does a GTN motion lead to numbers like this?

Put yourself in a buying seat for a moment. Assume two companies, A and B are exactly the same. But you’ve heard of A, gotten an organic reference about A, and already know two people on the team at A. All other things equal (pricing, product, etc), which are you most likely to end up buying from?

Increased Trust

Embracing a GTN strategy allows you to more easily build trust, and then create a transfer of trust between you and your market. Higher trust means better win rates, faster deal cycles, and ultimately better retention rates. In a world where copying product features is easier and faster than ever, your network of trust becomes your competitive advantage and moat.

A better understanding of customers

Go-to-Network puts your buyers and customers at the center of your strategy. Instead of trying to build a predictable system that’s designed for your company, you adapt to the buying habits and preferences of your buyers. Cultivating a network of relationships also means more frequent, higher quality feedback and insights to iterate your product, your process and your approach.

Reduced cost of support and content creation

Your members, customers, fans, and partners, when enabled correctly, will create content, support each other, and act as a network of mini megaphones amplifying everything you do. Customers will help customers by creating content about your product, sharing ways they use your product, and scaling you content and support efforts with you.

More organic word of mouth, cheaper marketing

84% of B2B buyers start a buying process with some form of referral or reference. Instead of trying to brings things to your market alone, you start bringing things to your market with your market.  It enables you to go from a single megaphone (your brand) bringing your messaging to market to a whole team of megaphones carrying the messaging on your behalf.

The Impact of Warm Intros and Referrals

Some of the previous outcomes are harder to measure with hard numbers, so let’s focus on the outcome of referrals and warm intros to show the impact of GTN on the most important number for a business - revenue.

This table features real numbers from a company, tracking their sales funnel from meeting to closed won over the course of a few months. As you can see, referrals and warm intros, on average, only represented 15% of meetings booked. Many of your favorite LinkedIn influencers would look at this table and proclaim that social, cold calls, and cold email are the best channels. After all, they represent 75% of meetings booked.

But as we move across the table and follow the funnel, the story changes. Cold calls have an incredibly high (but not unusual) 25% no show rate. That means a full quarter of the meetings booked there never even happened. On the flip side, warm intros have the lowest no show rate, at just 3%.

And it only continues to tell a different story as we keep going. Warm intros have a close rate 2-4x higher than any other channel and close at an above average ACV. When you follow the full funnel, that 15% of meetings ends up representing a full 32.7% of all closed won revenue for this company. Talk about punching above your weight. At a $20k ACV, let’s assume (generously) that, without intros, this company could still book the same amount of meetings. Redistributing that 15% of meetings across social, cold calling, and email still leaves the company $80,150 short on revenue. A full 25% less than if that 15% of meetings had come through their network.

Same number of meetings. 25% more revenue.

Investing in GTN for your revenue strategy doesn’t get much more compelling than that!