Walk - Adopting GTN

Goal: Layer in network creation and scale activation with additional plays and strategies

You’ve proven that activating your network yields results, with proven meetings and deals closed from the crawl phase. Now it’s time to get the rest of your sales team, as well as marketing and CS involved. Start layering in network creation activities while scaling the activation plays.

Start investing in intentional network creation

There are so many ways to grow your network. Here are 4 low hanging and easy places to start.

Host a dinner series

In-person events are magical, but often daunting to put together. Instead of going big, think smaller and more intimate with your events. Invite 8-10 customers and prospects together for a nice dinner or casual gathering. Mixing customers and prospects can be a good way to organically get people talking about your product without you having to force the conversation.

Create a customer advisory board

Bring a small group of your best customers (or target customers if you’re earlier stage) into your inner circle. Give them early access to your product and new features, some equity and ownership in your business, and incentivize them to bring the voice of your customers and market to your team.

Get your team posting on LinkedIn

Finding your voice on LinkedIn is probably the single most impactful ‘free’ thing you can do to start growing your network and attracting new buyers organically. Starting doesn’t have to be complicated. Commit to 3 posts per week, and 15 minutes per day engaging and commenting with others content. Focus on adding valuing and starting conversations, not selling.

Find early partners

You don’t need to launch a full scale partner program to start building an ecosystem. Find 3-5 other companies at a similar stage to yours that sell to a similar ICP. Reach out and find ways to co-create content, whether it’s hosting a webinar or dinner together, or creating videos. Start embedding that partner thinking in your marketing team early by tasking them to find partners to attach to existing campaign ideas.

Operationalize network checks

As your networks scale and grow, new opportunity for activation will present itself and you can go beyond just telling your sellers to ask for intros when the option presents itself.

Add a warm intro check before outbound

Before sending that cold email or making that cold call, implement a process for your sellers to check the network for potential warm intros. Better yet, you can use a tool like Commsor to do this automatically and at scale so you don’t have to worry about the manual work.

Leverage your network to accelerate deals

Intros into new accounts are the low hanging fruit, but you can also use your network to accelerate deals. You can leverage intros to multithread existing deals more effectively and tap into your network to help influence deals to get them across the finish line.

As you operationalize GTN in your sales process, you’ll find ways that your network scales your pipeline, increases your win rates, and decreases your sales cycle.

TIP: Consider hosting Bi-weekly Network Power Hours with your team and executives to get everyone involved in contributing their networks and seeing the power of GTN. Get your sellers working directly with execs, partners, advisors etc to help sponsor deals and open doors.

By the end of the walk phase, your GTM team should be fully bought into Go-to-Network and excited by the results you’re seeing. At this stage you can start running by embedding GTN into the core of your growth strategies for the long term.

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