Introduction and Foreword
What is Go-to-Network?
Go-to-Network (GTN) is a strategic approach and model where a business activates networks including customers, partners, investors, and communities to drive growth.
While traditional Go-to-Market strategies focus on direct channels and a linear funnel, GTN focuses on network creation and pulling the market into your direct sphere of influence.
Outbound is increasingly complex and costly—while waning in effectiveness—making GTN an exciting strategy to consider and embrace. Pair that with a drive for efficient growth rather than growth at all costs, and you’re left with a situation where GTN is critical.
Executing on Go-to-Network requires investing in two halves: network creation, activities that bring buyers into your sphere of influence; and network activation, how you turn those networks into business value.
About this resource:
If you booked the same amount of meetings last year, but 20% of them had come from warm intros and referrals, how much more revenue would you have made, on average?
17%. With the exact same number of meetings booked. Why?
Because warm intros and referrals are more likely to close, faster to close, tend to spend more money, and less likely to churn than deals booked from other sources.
Every seller knows this, but typically they treat referrals as something that “just happens when they happen”. Most don’t realize that by adopting Go-to-Network thinking and strategy, they can operationalize and get 20%, or even more, of their meetings this way.
In this playbook, you will learn how to both create and activate a network with stories, tactical guidance, and templates you can start using today.
Our hope in creating this resource isn’t to encourage you to stop other sales activities that are working for you but rather to give you guidance on layering additional sources of warm, sustainable revenue for you and your organization.
Because tactics are temporary, but your network is forever.
Why You Need Go-to-Network in Your Sales Strategy
The predictable revenue model isn't quite so predictable anymore. AI is exciting, but it’s also sending shock waves of fear through every industry. With AI, tactics are going out of style in a matter of days instead of months or years. Managers are trying to wrangle their teams and meet new expectations, but by the time they figure a tactic out, it’s overplayed.
The Path of Destructive AI Creation
“The world is changing so fast, it’s giving everyone anxiety. Nothing is predictable anymore. What’s working today is warm introductions. But no matter what happens in the future, relationships will always cut through the noise. ”
Aaron Ross - Sales Advisor and Author of Predictable Revenue
“Predictable revenue is broken. It’s pointless to optimize something that doesn’t work. Switching from GTM to GTN is the epitome of work smarter, not harder. The GTN model isn’t new—it’s bringing the Rolodex into the modern age.”
Eric Iannello - Head of GTN Sales at Commsor
For the past 10 years, many companies have been built on a model of "growth at all costs.” Budgets were big, selling was relatively easy, and buyers were eager to try new tools.
But now, sustainable and efficient growth is rewarded. Spending has stalled, and buyers are more cautious about spending money.
Selling has gotten a lot harder, but sales leaders are still trying to create predictable revenue systems. They continue to be focused on input metrics, pushing their team to make more calls, send more emails, hoping to find something perfectly predictable. Spoiler alert - nothing in sales is perfectly predictable, and this push for quantity is creating the very system in which your outreach becomes less effective. We’ve created an outbound ouroboros.
Buyers are getting better and more intentional at ignoring cold outbound, even as sales teams try to gobble up their decreasing attention spans. This leads to sales teams pushing even more outbound, which in turn makes buyers pull back further. Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat....
The Outbound Ouroboros continues to devour itself:
In light of this, more companies are turning to their network. Some call it a community, others call it their ecosystem. But across each of them, it’s a combination of advisors, investors, partners, customers, and executives. By adopting Go-to-Network strategies, companies can shift tack and fight back against the outbound ouroboros.
At the end of the day, GTN is a quality game. In a sea of revenue teams trying to scale the quantity game, quality is how you stand out and ultimately win.
It’s not just about creating networks, but also about activating networks to drive and influence new business. The numbers speak for themselves:
Referral stats on value, likelihood, conversion, and executive preference
GTN is about so much more than just referrals and asking for intros. A stronger network leads to more brand awareness, more word of mouth, stronger brand affinity. All things that become more and more critical as AI makes every other part of business easier to copy.
But those outcomes are often 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 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!
Keep reading to learn more about the two halves of a good GTN strategy - Network Creation and Network Activation.
Create a Network Worth Activating
1. The Mindset Shift
Adopting GTN starts with a mindset shift. Over the last 10+ years most sellers (and sales leaders) have been taught two things that have been damaging over time.
- If you do enough activity, you’ll more often than not hit quota.
- Tools can solve all your problems.
These are not true (nor were they really ever). Activity is of course important, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle in sales success. Ever notice how the best sellers often don’t follow the exact playbook or have the highest activity numbers?
So many sales tools have taught sellers to “push button, get value.” Push button, get a list of enriched data. Push button, start a sequence to 1000 prospects. Push button, dial 10 numbers at once.
Don’t get us wrong, tools have a place (we build and sell a tool ourselves!), but the sellers who truly understand GTN have a different mindset. They understand that selling is a game of relationships and trust. It’s a game that takes ages to build up, but only seconds to destroy. 88% of buyers say they only buy when they view a salesperson as a ‘trusted advisor.’ [SOURCE 4 NDR]
Here are a few ways you can start to shift your mindset.
- Discover the world between closed-lost and closed-won
- Drop the commission breath
- Build real relationships
- Embrace your Network Addressable Market
- Start building a network early
Network Addressable Market
When looking at the marketing and building account lists, many focus on two key groups: Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM).
There’s a third to consider though - your Network Addressable Market (NAM). NAM is the subset of your SAM that's already connected to your network through first- and second-degree relationships. While your NAM is likely significantly smaller, it represents your most accessible opportunities for new business.
Rather than just pursing cold outreach across your entire SAM, prioritize your NAM. This approach allows you to:
- Leverage warm introductions and existing relationships
- Build credibility through referrals and testimonials
- Create a larger network, growing your NAM and creating a self reinforcing growth loop
And once you’ve done that, consider how you can increase your NAM through more network creation actions.
“Go-to-Network should be used as a way to prioritize and segment target accounts, as well as an outreach medium. Accounts should be stack-ranked by their reachability so warm introduction opportunities rise to the top.”
Scott Martinis - Founder and CEO at B2B Catalyst
There’s a world of opportunity between closed-lost and closed-won
Stop operating on binary outcomes. Yes, your goal is to sell, but not everyone will buy right now. The best way to be top of mind when they are ready to buy is to find something between closed-won and closed-lost. We’ve seen sellers turn a “not right now” into 4 net-new meetings just by asking “Do you know anyone else that would find this interesting?” at the end of a discovery call.
Always go warm if you can
Just because cold outbound is tried and true doesn’t mean it’s the best method available. Experienced sales leaders often have enormous mindset blocks when it comes to Go-to-Network, simply because they’re proud of their ability to handle rejection and hustle harder than other sellers.And that’s great. We respect that. But don’t let an obsession with hard work keep your team from experiencing warmer, faster deals. Why go cold when you could go warm?
Try new things before you get commission breath
Commission breath is an invisible smell of desperation and pushiness that buyers can sense from a seller. Not everyone will buy from you, and that’s ok. Treat each buyer with respect, and remember that only they can decide when they buy.
Don’t let your desperation for commission get in the way of being a decent human being when selling.
People buy from people they trust
Fair or not, the old saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is often true, especially with enterprise deals. Buyers buy from people they trust, and its a hell of a lot easier to be trusted if you’re already known. Being known can come from your own connection with a buyer, or from leveraging a mutual connection through an investor, customer, executive, or partner.
Don’t assume you can’t use GTN because you’re too green
Often we hear from sellers and sales leaders that they can’t adopt a GTN strategy because they personally have no network amongst their target market. They also tell us “I’m just a BDR, who’s going to listen to me?”.
Get rid of the idea that your role dictates the value that you can provide to another human, and instead, start thinking of the value you can provide. Your task is to figure out what tools, content, and data are helpful to your target buyer and offer the right resources in conversations.
Besides, GTN isn’t just about your personal network. It’s a team effort and all about creating and activating the shared network around your business. You’ve probably got investors, advisors, executives, partners, and customers who’s networks you can tap into.
2. Social Selling and Content Creation
Creating content on social media isn’t just for influencers and big names. It’s one of the most powerful tools a seller can use to build authentic connections and awareness with their buyers. The goal (usually) isn’t to go viral or be famous, but to be consistent and connect with your buyers.
As long as you’re willing to show up, you can make social selling work for you. This section focuses on social selling as it relates to LinkedIn, but the learnings here can be applied to other platforms, or even content creation in general.
"We looked at 1041 outbound messages across companies and saw a 3.6x higher reply rate when sellers have at least one authentic organic touch point, post publicly, and reach out in response to relevant activity"
Parthi Loganathan - Founder & CEO at Letterdrop
Start with conversations
LinkedIn can be a goldmine if you use it right, especially if your buyers hang out on there. Some people have the misconception that only salespeople and marketers spend time on the platform, but we know sellers who are crushing it using it to reach out to compliance lawyers, HR leaders, CTOs and every other role you can imagine.
Remember - just because they aren’t posting on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they aren’t using it. There’s an old rule of thumb for internet forums called the 90-9-1 rule. It states that in online communities, only 1% create, 9% engage, and the remaining 90% only consume.
“Even though all prevailing advice is to never pitch slap, I pitch in my first message. I do 10+ minutes of research per account and write a personalized, relevant message for each person, so no matter what’s going on, I send nine highly personalized messages every day. Because of this, my pipeline is always full.”
Darren McKee - Social Selling Coach
Thanks for reminding us, Bronto! We can all benefit from being a bit more creative and real. Conversations can start with fun interactions, not just serious business talk.
In addition to testing different conversation starters, be sure to test out your formats. Try sending short video messages to your top-priority accounts, and see if you get more responses. Video has a great way of humanizing your message and making it feel more personal.
3 video prospecting tips from our friends at Sendspark
- Keep it short. 30-60 seconds is ideal.
- Be creative. Include a background that’s relevant to your prospect to grab attention. Be yourself!
- You need a hook. The first 5 seconds of your video determine if people will engage. Avoid starting with “Hi, my name is X and I work for X.”
Keep conversations flowing
Using your experience and intuition, offer to hop on a call. Don’t do it too soon, or you’ll come off as inexperienced and desperate. People get countless invitations to sales calls from high-volume, low-quality outreach, so you need to be careful. After they’ve engaged with you and sent a handful of messages, you can shoot your shot and offer a call.
Make sure to keep track of opportunities in your CRM. You might be having over 100 conversations going on at any given time. Only add people to your CRM once they’ve shown intent—either by booking a call or stating that they would like to have a call with you. It’s important not to bog down your CRM prematurely or overestimate your pipeline.
Start with comments
Posting content can be daunting at first, but theres an easy way to start - commenting on other peoples content. Often, a well timed and thought out comment will get more attention than your posts.
Engage with prospects, subject matter experts, and influencers in your space. Just be sure your comments add something to the conversation, rather than just agreeing with the original post. Oh, and people can tell when you’re using AI to do your comments. Be better than that.
An added bonus is that you’ll also find that your comments act as starting points and can often be fleshed out into full posts.
“I personally block out an hour and a half every morning to go through LinkedIn posts and engage. I’m not looking just for content from my first-degree connections, but I’m also searching for specific topics and hashtags. I comment thoughtfully on posts to form relationships with people in the space, showcase that I know what I’m talking about, add value, and learn from other people. Genuinely wanting to learn is a very important aspect.”
Adam Jay - Co-founder and CEO of Revenue Reimagined
Post like nobody’s watching
Sometimes, sellers are afraid of showing up on LinkedIn. Fear of failure, imposter syndrome, and social media shyness can strike at any time. But here’s the deal, if nobody likes or comments on your posts, they won’t be seen by very many people. Slowly, you’ll start to learn which posts perform well, and your best content will be seen by more people. You gotta start somewhere.
Not sure what to start writing about? Put your ICP first. What can you post that will be interesting, helpful, or relatable to your target buyers? If you can answer that, then you’ve got a treasure trove of things to write about.
In general you can think in three categories - memes, thought leadership, and product content.
Below is a list of 15 content ideas for salespeople from our friends at Aware. Use it as a starting point for creating content and then go from there.
15 LinkedIn post ideas for salespeople from our friends at Aware:
- Post a photo of you and your team and customers at an event together (social proof)
- "Here's how to X" (something your ICP wants to be able to do better)
- Reflect on a life or career milestone, and include a picture
- "X isn't dead. But Z needs to change." Break down a common tactic in your field
- Share a .gif or video showcasing a new product feature and why it'll help your ICP
- Address a current trend in your market, but provide a nuanced (not black-and-white) take
- "Here's how we [generated XYZ result] for [ABC client]", then tell a brief case study
- Talk about why all of your competitors built a feature one way, but why your company didn't
- "[TITLE]s: there's a lot of conflicting advice about [TOPIC]. Let me dispel some misconceptions:"
- Highlight a SaaS partner, implementation consultant, or customer
- "I spent Z]hours creating [X]. And I’m giving it away." Then share a .gif of you scrolling through it
- "What worked in [past year, e.g. 2019] won’t work now" with a trend that needs to go away
- Educational carousel in your brand colors, simplifying a complex topic
- Share an anonymized quote from a discovery call with a prospect, then discuss the solution
- Original research: "We analyzed [first party data], and found [incredible insight]
Leverage what you already have
You’re sitting on a treasure trove of content ideas and you don’t even realize it - calls with prospects and customers. What better place to find ideas to write about that will resonate with your buyers than conversations with your buyers?
“Not sure what to write about? I often use AI (Claude) to find topic and post ideas from my customer call transcripts. I DO NOT use it to write posts for me, just to help pull out ideas or patterns from calls I might have missed. This helps make sure I’m writing content that is relevant to my prospects and target market.”
Mac Reddin - Founder & El Rey de Dinos @ Commsor
Mix engagement-focused posts with lead drivers
Unless you’re Mark Benioff, no one is going to care what you have to say if you only share sales content about your product. Your content shouldn’t be a constant billboard. It’s called a “personal brand” for a reason.
At the same time, don’t chase likes. The content that sells will often not be your best performing content. You gotta mix it up and give people a reason to care about what you have to say.
“Product marketing posts bring in more demand. They are not that popular, but the people who interact with them are typically our perfect customers. My content and subsequent interactions serve as the warm intro.”
Laura Erdem - Sales Manager at Dreamdata
Make it easy with memes
You’re likely not selling to other sales people, so it’s going to be hard to be perceived as an expert by your target buyers. But what if instead of being seen as an expert you’re seen as relatable through your understanding?
Memes can be a universal language that show your buyers you understand them. Posting things they’ll relate to and find amusing can sometimes build relationships better than the thought leader approach. Especially if the latter is obviously forced.
“My content is very approachable, with lots of humor and sarcasm. I’m all about memes. I don’t try to write smart posts that are going to intimidate people. My goal is to talk to someone. I want them to feel like we met at an airport and are sharing a beer. What are you up to? Where are you flying? That’s the kind of vibe I put out with my content so I can help people feel comfortable when they talk to me on the phone. Low pressure and no big expectations.”
Roy Schuhmacher - Enterprise Sales Manager at HireVue
3. Leveraging Events
Trade shows, private dinners, and industry events can all be excellent places for growing your network. There’s no replacement for face-to-face interactions, as people are more likely to do business with people they already know.
Utilize GTN data to select worthwhile events
Some sales leaders achieve measurable ROI from events—others don’t. Not only are you paying for the travel, sponsorship, and hosting costs of the various events you participate in, but you also lose out on the time your team could’ve spent implementing or improving other systems. Make sure to track how much pipeline is coming from events so you can get a sense of the cost per deal. Based on that information, you can shift your spending to attend more or fewer events this year.
Be sure to also utilize available GTN data when choosing events. For instance, you might connect with priority accounts via Commsor-sourced warm intros and ask which events they’ll be attending this year. Or you could use a tool like Vendelux, an event-intelligence platform that surfaces information on where your prospects, customers, competitors, and active pipeline will be. Vendelux analyzes 35k+ websites, networking apps, and social media to deliver this info.
“Most teams aren’t using data to determine which events are worthwhile. How do we actually determine if we’re going to get a good ROI? How do we execute on this? You don’t have to guess anymore.”
Stanton Quan - Head of Mid-Market Sales at Vendelux
5 factors to consider when choosing events
- Active pipeline - Tally up the total number of active deals or the total number of late-stage deals that need to get over the line. Make sure to have the right reps attend the right events based on pipeline.
- ICP - Consider who will be in attendance, including certain industries, roles at organizations, the size of companies, etc.
- Accounts - More and more companies want to move towards ABM and organize their own sponsored events, happy hours, and dinners around major tradeshows for these accounts.
- Customers - Retention is on everyone's mind. Attend and host events that bring you face-to-face with your top customers.
- Competitors - This is almost a FOMO play, as leadership always wants to know where their competitors will be so they can take advantage of investing more or less in a particular event
Create content at events
If you approach events with a secondary content creation goal, you’ll both have a stronger excuse to start conversations with buyers, and you’ll extend the window of value long after the event. Events end, but content keeps giving.
“Going into any event, half of our strategy is content creation. Some events are more about content creation than anything else. Our sales team works with a content facilitator who helps them capture, edit, and upload content live throughout the event.”
Rich Patterson - VP of Sales at MasonHub
For example, at HubSpot Inbound 2024, our team brought custom hot sauce, a microphone, and a camera (just a phone, nothing fancy). We asked people to try out crazy hot sauce and then share their spiciest tip for sales and marketing teams.
This gave people a specific reason to come find and talk to us besides just listening to a sales pitch. But more importantly, it gave us the ability to extend the value of the event long after it ended. Over the course of a month we dripped out each video, and asked our audience to vote on the hottest tip. We drove more leads from the content after the event than we did from the event itself.
You can reach event attendees online and further your connections while also driving impressions across similar audiences and growing your brand awareness amongst industry pros not in attendance.
Consider having a designated content facilitator on board to snap photos and videos, write captions, and keep sellers posting.
Event content ideas
- Selfies and group photos with team members, customers, and partners
- Vlogs, showing the behind the scenes of your team attending
- Micro interviews that can be turned into short content
- Get creative! As more teams produce content, the bar gets raised
4. Give Give Give Give Give
Give isn’t enough. As a seller, you need to take a give-give-give-help approach. Give to people in your network without expecting anything in return. Spend time helping people in your industry, either on LinkedIn or in a dedicated forum or Slack community. It’s a long game that enables you to build truly authentic connections long before they’re needed.
At the end of the day, a sellers job is to help a buyer save money, save time, make money, live a better life, etc. Only once you prove you can help them do that do you achieve a sale.
You don’t just have to help directly with the problem related to what you’re selling. There are many ways to give to your market before you sell to them.
“A lot of my giving comes down to the work I do with Women in Sales. I spend a lot of time there just helping people with tips and tricks—how to become better sellers, providing connections, and introducing people to each other.”
Christina Brady - Co-founder and CEO of Luster
Giving is a mindset. It can be as simple as authentically engaging with and supporting someones content or amplifying someones messaging when they’re hiring or looking for a new role.
Or it can be as complex as jumping in and helping someone solve a problem unrelated to what you sell. If you’re active in communities with your target market, find ways to share insights, provide helpful links, or connect people that can help each other.
3 GTN ways to give to prospects
The Secret Recruiter - “Love your product, but we need to hire someone for this role first.” This is a common objection you’ll hear from buyers. Instead of pushing through, tap into your network and introduce them to someone that’s a great fit for the role.
The Meta Connector - This one works if you’re selling to sales teams. If you know someone that would be a good prospect for your prospect, make the intro!The
Knowledgeable Expert - During discovery, you’ll often learn of adjacent problems your prospect has. If you know a tool or person who can help with those problems, make the recommendation or intro for them!
"Here’s the greatest GTN sales play I’ve ever made. One account had to push the timeline because they needed to hire a new rep. I went into my network and found an old colleague and introduced them. He gets hired within a week and the Head of Sales Dev said thanks for making his job so easy. Our conversation moved up two months and the deal is that much closer to the finish line.”
Eric Iannello - Head of GTN Sales at Commsor
Activate Networks to Drive Revenue
1. Your Network Can Impact Every Stage
Contrary to popular believe, Go-to-Network is about so much more than just asking for intros to book new sales meetings. As a seller, you can (and should) leverage your company’s network whenever possible, at every stage. From awareness to selection and through closed-won and beyond.
You can think of network activation across 3 types of actions - introductions, intelligence and influence.
On the next page you’ll find a classic revenue bow tie, showing pre and post sales revenue stages. Alongside it you’ll see examples of leveraging intros, intel and influence to leverage your network to drive healthier revenue.
2. Source Meetings from Intros
There’s been a 5x increase since 2019 in outbound touch points needed to get one deal in the pipeline, to as much as 1400! That’s 0.071%. Ouch. Let’s play a little game - can you find the 1 ‘deal in pipeline’ among all the touch points below?
That’s 0.071%. Ouch. Let’s play a little game - can you find the 1 ‘deal in pipeline’ among all the touch points below?
In contrast, successful warm intros lead to meetings 50% of the time (sometimes even close to 75%!). That means you need 2 intro touch points to get 1 deal in the pipeline.
Most organizations are not operationalizing warm introductions to book more meetings. Warm intros are either not prioritized, or the legwork is done completely manually, without any technology used to speed up the process. Memories, spreadsheets, and watered-down LinkedIn connections are incapable of sourcing the true value of your company’s and partners’ personal networks.
Of course not every deal or target account will be reachable through warm intros, but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t add a warm intro check to your process before you go straight to cold outreach.
Who to source warm intros from:
- Happy customers
- Your executive team
- Friends and former colleagues
- Investors and advisors
- Tech and ecosystem partners
- Influencers
- Team members
Remember that table from page 9? Warm intros aren’t just about booking more meetings, but about booking higher quality meetings. Meetings and deals from intros are more likely to close, close faster, have a higher ACV, and ultimately churn less.
In fact, if you booked the exact same amount of meetings, but just 10% came from intros, you’d likely end up close 12-15% MORE total revenue.
Absolutely, leveraging you and your company’s network for intros is about quality, not quantity. But even then, your network is a living, breathing thing. It’s always evolving.
New people are entering your network, people within your network are changing jobs, etc. This is also why a good GTN strategy consists of network creation AND activation. If you only pull value from your network, you’re likely going to see it run dry eventually.
Ok, but how and when do you actually ask for intros to book meetings? We’ve got you covered, so read on!
Just start asking.
Many sellers seem to lack the confidence and belief that buyers and customers will be willing to make referrals for them. Yet studies show that 91% of customers say they’re willing to make referrals, while only 11% of sellers ever ask for them.
It all starts with the mindset shift from the network creation section. When you do a great job, deliver value to your relationships, and back up your words with actions, you earn the right to ask who else you could be helping.
Go back to your last role (or two).
Make things easy on yourself. Get started with your closest connections over the past few years of your work history. Former colleagues who’ve also changed jobs, or even former prospects you sold to. Many B2B buyers have indicated that they actually prefer working with sales reps they’ve worked with in the past!
Outbound is certainly not dead, but the best opportunities lie in warm outreach. In my experience, especially in the enterprise segment, referrals have made up 40-50% of the overall new business…just purely off somebody knowing somebody. My first approach when joining a new team is to always start with people that I’ve worked with over the last 2-3 years, people that I know will be happy to get me introductions.”
Stanton Quan -Head of Mid-Market Sales at Vendelux
Ask prospects
We’ve all been there. You’ve got an excited prospect, you’ve treated them well, they love what you’re selling, but for whatever reason the deal won’t progress. Maybe it’s timing, or budget, or some other reason. This can actually be the perfect time to ask for a referral rather than treating it like a total loss.
At Commsor we’ve turned a “not right now” into as many as 4 net new meetings using this messaging at the end of a positive discovery call.
Ask existing customers
After an existing customer has a positive moment (first ROI, shared positive feedback, created a case study, etc) you should absolutely be asking them for intros . In fact, 91% of customers say they’re willing to make intros and referrals, but only 11% of sellers ever ask.
Use that positive moment to remind them how much your product or service benefits them and ask if they know any others who would also benefit.
Get investors, advisors, and board members involved
They are, after all, quite literally already invested in you and your company’s success. Leverage shared portfolio companies and others that your investors might already know. Your CEO is likely sending these people an investor update each month, which is the perfect time to ask for intros.
Put together a list of your biggest target accounts (try to keep it under 50, even under 25 so its hyper specific), and ask your CEO to include a link + an ask for any intros to those companies in the next investor update they send.
🦕 Implement technology to help
Rather than scraping LinkedIn connections manually or asking your network to go through your list and let you know who they know, use tools like Commsor to do it for you at scale.
Commsor helps you map your network of investors, advisors, executives, partners, happy customers and more to surface warm intro paths to your next deal. Easily add a warm intro check before you send that cold email or make that cold call.
Bonus - Commsor turns your intro requests intro trackable actions that you can measure and understand exactly how they’re working. Just like calls or emails.
“There are a lot of high-profile people in our company that forget they have a huge network that we can utilize. If we connect on Commsor, I can ping them with the right requests. It’s specific and small. Instead of making a big ask to sift through their entire network, I’m only asking for the best opportunities. This eliminates the grunt work from the high-profile folks and turns BDRs into great salespeople.”
Roy Schuhmacher - Enterprise Sales Manager at HireVue
Setup weekly GTN meetings with executive sponsors
Your executives can often open doors faster and more effectively than you can as a sales person. Set up regular meetings with executive sponsors—such as your CEO, CTO, or VP of Marketing—where you find out who they know and leverage them as your messenger.
The executive sponsor effectively acts as the BDR, scouring the prospect list for opportunities and then teeing them up.
Revenue Reimagined’s Power Hour
“We're a big fan of what we call the Power Hour, which is once a week. We'll literally get the senior executives on the phone with the prospect list from the data that we can pull from Commsor or Sales Nav and see where we have that overlap.”
Adam Jay - Co-founder and CEO of Revenue Reimagined
Get your whole team involved
The rest of your organization is likely incredibly underutilized for getting intros. There’s an easy, low effort way to fix that.
Create a Slack (or Teams, if you must) channel. Call it something like #intros or #network and make it a place where any seller on your team can drop in an account they’re trying to get in touch with and see who can help.
Maybe they have a friend there, or used to work there. This becomes especially helpful at larger orgs when you simply don’t know who knows who. Bonus points for offering referral incentives for your team. You probably offer them for hiring referrals, so why not customer referrals?
Build an intro bounty board
You’ve probably never considered sharing your target account list publicly, but why not?
We did this at Commsor, and in a month booked 17 meetings with accounts on our top 50 named account list. We created an intro board, and shared it with investors, customers, and friends. We even posted it publicly on LinkedIn and got traction there.
You can create one for free here, or you can just create a Google Sheet to share. The intro board works well because you’re adding a layer of specificity to your ask. You’re not just asking someone for intros to anyone, you’re asking if they know people at one of those specific companies. It vastly reduces the mental load on them being able to help you.
You probably have a lot more willing connectors in your network than you realize. Use the following messaging as a starting point when reaching out to share your intro board with others.
Incentivize where needed
Organic advocates make intros without you asking and willing connectors will make intros if you ask, but there’s a third group - incentivized partners. They’ll gladly make intros and referrals - if you give them an incentive.
That incentive doesn’t have to be monetary. It could be custom swag, a discount on your product, or even an intro swap.
Offering 5% of deal value for a referral might seem crazy, but take a hard look at your numbers. If you’re like a lot of companies, that 5% will still be cheaper than a meeting booked in other ways.
How you decide to incentivize your network (if you do), depends on your product, your margins, and what you’re comfortable doing.
Ways to consider incentivizing your network to make intros
Meeting held - Send the referrer $500 after a qualified prospect attends the meeting.
Deal value - Offer a % of deal value when a referred deal closes.
Reseller Option - Give the referred the option to take a % of deal value or pass that % on as savings to the new customer.
Combo - Stack incentives. Offer something for making the qualified intro, and an additional incentive if/when that intro turns into a closed deal.
Follow-up with intro makers!
This may seem painfully obvious, but it’s wild how often sellers forget to do this. A happy customer refers you to a new account, and then they never hear from you again. Make sure to keep them in the loop if you want to get more referrals from them in the future!
A simple note appreciating them for the intro, and letting them know when the deal closes works wonders. You can even consider going the extra mile, sending them a small gift, taking them out to dinner, or sending them a handwritten note.People appreciate being appreciated.
3. Accelerate and Multithread Deals
As much as your favorite LinkedIn influencer may say otherwise, sales is not about booking meetings. It’s about moving deals forward effectively, bringing value to your prospects, and closing deals reliably and repeatably.
And that’s why multithreading is such a critical skill for top performing sellers. According a survey by UserGems, single-threaded opportunities have a 5% chance of closing. But take that lone wolf up to 5 stakeholders (multithreading it), and your chance of winning jumps to 30%! Not only that, but they found that multithreaded deals closed faster and had higher ACVs!
There are a lot of ways to multithread deals, but one of the most often overlooked ways is leveraging your network. Many sellers rely on their internal champion opening doors for them, or sending cold messages to stakeholders to try and loop them in.
As soon as you get off a good initial call, jump into your network and see which investors, team members, or existing customers can open doors to other stakeholders for you. Steal this messaging as a starting point.
“An influencer gets a very different message than a decision maker who gets a very different message than an economic buyer. A CFO doesn't give a crap what a salesperson has to say, but A CFO does care about what another CFO says. Utilize your network to connect folks with like titles across the organization. If you can’t match up people exactly, make sure the messaging is at least tailored to each contact.”
Adam Jay - Co-founder and CEO of Revenue Reimagined
Make sure you’re people-first
The fastest way to get a deal done is to work with your buyer—not against them. Most sales processes are company-centric and seller-centric. For example, think of how many reps refuse to demo the product until the second call, even if the buyer has done enough research and is ready for a tour. Too many reps fail to consider what the buyer really cares about and why they’re on the call.
It’s important to dig into the buyer’s personality, communication style, and how they want to be sold to. You can use a tool like Luster to get really good at this. Luster provides AI-driven insights, coaching, and sales call practice sessions.
“Your GTN strategy should give you the capability to learn about who you’re selling to and become an expert in the things they care about. Ask questions to figure out how they like to buy. Be more human in your approach instead of forcing people through a specific buying process that reeks of commission breath.”
Christina Brady - Co-founder and CEO of Luster
Here are some questions you might ask to tailor the sales process to the individual buyer:
- How do you typically like to buy software?
- How much time do you set aside for initiatives like this?
- Are you usually the only person involved in decisions?
- What brings you into the room?
- What can I do to help you?
- How would you like to get to know the technology?
- Do you want to email back and forth?
- Do you want to hop in a meeting?
- Do you want to watch a demo video?
Get influencers involved
We often think of influencers as a marketing tactic to generate awareness. But their presence can really fire up a late-stage deal. Consider having a few different influencers on hand to join in on sales calls and demos with top-priority accounts. They can provide first-hand knowledge of your product while also speaking to the efficacy of the underlying strategy and best practices that your product operationalizes.
“You use influencers you’re already working with and bring them into the deals. Invite them to join in on sales calls to build deeper trust and connection with the buyer.”
Vin Matano - Founder of Creatorbuzz
4. Network Social Proof
Quotes, case studies, and other forms of social proof are critical to helping close deals. In fact, as much as 80% of B2B buyers end up buying a product already used by someone they know and trust.
But most sellers treat social proof as a passive thing, slipping a case study into a follow up email or only offering up a customer reference once the prospect asks for it.
You can leverage your network and be more proactive, surrounding your prospects with social proof before they even know to ask about it.
“I am a big believer that in today's environment, no one is buying anything without validating that product with their network.”
Adam Jay - Co-founder and CEO of Revenue Reimagined
Connect prospects with customers
Don’t wait for prospects to ask for a reference call. Take the initiative and find the right time to offer it proactively. Even if the prospect doesn’t take you up on it, the up front willingness to let customers do the speaking rather than just you as the seller will speak loads to the confidence you have in your own product.
Try to offer up a reference from a similar company (size, industry, use case) rather than just walking out someone from a small, overused pool of happy customers.
Social Surround
Sometimes you don’t need the social proof to happen live, with a direct connection between prospect or customer.
Instead if you find that one of your customers already knows your prospect (through LinkedIn connections, past employment overlap, etc) you can ask that customer to reach out to your prospect on your behalf and let them know how much they love your tool or service.
5. Backchannel New Info
Sometimes, rather than leveraging a direct action from your network, such as an intro, you can get value through information that your network has access to. Information about buy processes at their old company, priorities that a former colleague is focusing on, etc.
Expand existing accounts with GTN
GTN is not only great for deal acceleration, but expansion too. When you take a GTN approach to expansion, you get multiple avenues for connecting with decision-makers. You have access to your existing points of contact, as well as other partners, colleagues, and friends who also know your target buyers. Instead of just having one pathway to expansion, you can discover and open up other opportunities.
Ask mutual connections for intel about the team you want to expand into, and then utilize that intel in your messaging and conversations.
Track Champion job changes
GTN is not only great for deal acceleration, but expansion too. When you take a GTN approach to expansion, you get multiple avenues for connecting with decision-makers. You have access to your existing points of contact, as well as other partners, colleagues, and friends who also know your target buyers. Instead of just having one pathway to expansion, you can discover and open up other opportunities.
And remember—GTN goes beyond intros. Ask mutual connections for intel about the team you want to expand into, and then utilize that intel in your messaging and conversations.
6. Co-Sell with Partners
Your network isn’t just the people in and around your company - but also the other organizations you partner with. These maybe integration partners, service partners, or simply marketing partners. Each of these partners offers an incredible opportunity for sales teams to co-sell.
First things first - you need to identify and get access to your partners. If your company doesn’t yet have any formal partner program, start by looking for potential partners who are already involved with your business.
First things first - you need to identify and get access to your partners. If your company doesn’t yet have any formal partner program, start by looking for potential partners who are already involved with your business.
How to find more partners
Affiliates - Which affiliates are doing the best? Can you find more of them?
Customers - Which customers could be incentivized to refer people to you? How can you turn them into partners?
Vendors - Which platforms and agencies are part of your customers’ ecosystems?
Influencers - Which influencers in your industry could introduce people to you?
“The first question I ask myself is, who’s already sold to the target customers? If I find one company that’s already got sixty of those accounts as a customer, it’s like boom—that’s a partnership. What can I give them? Do I have customers I can give them? Is there a story we can bring to market together? That’s when we start playing around with it. There should be commitments from both sides, but the exchange doesn’t have to be perfectly equal.”
Alex Buckles - CEO of Forecastable
Buyers don’t only operate on facts, they also rely on relationships. Knowing WHO specifically works with your prospective buyer at a partner company can give you robust relational knowledge that no data tool could ever capture. This deep, business-relationship level knowledge is the #1 secret that so many have yet to adopt, but this is the reality of how giants like Microsoft operate. This is what you could consider the “golf-course” type conversations of old.
“Most companies dealing with this economy are now prioritizing partnerships. Here are some of my favorite tips:
Get a reality check - Everyone can say who they know until they’re blue in the face, but when we first hook up Commsor, it’s a reality check. That acts as a double-edged sword. Sometimes it shows that we don’t have the connections we expect, and we’re going to have to work harder. Sometimes, we see they have lots of relationships at a big account.
Leverage a discovery questionnaire - Create a standard questionnaire with dozens of potential questions reps can ask in their messages and during meetings. Pull from these questions whenever you need them instead of relying on a more defined discovery process.
Don’t wait for intros - In a previous role, I stopped waiting on my partner manager. I started figuring out who he was connected to and asking for specific introductions. I realized I could teach other people how to do that, and that’s a big part of our agency’s success.
Find pathways - We use Commsor to figure out our pathways to get to the VPs we need. We customize the messaging to get from one person to another, one at a time. We work the pathways very manually.
Compare warm to cold - We want to compare ourselves against SDR outbound all day long because we can guarantee the pipeline in the first 60 to 90 days will be better than cold outbound in 90% of situations. If there are already partnership successes, we can guarantee our service will beat cold CAC. Anyone implementing a partner program should be able to measure & prove better CAC.”
Alex Buckles - CEO of Forecastable
Incentivizing partners
The best part? In the co-sell process, there is a natural incentive for any scenario (an existing transacted business relationship AND a personal connection) to remain value-oriented. No one wants to look bad making an intro that falls through. This protects the interaction and it increases the “hit-rate” of a positive outcome.
Co-selling offers a lot of opportunities to be creative. While affiliate deals are typically the default incentive, there are so many other ways to go about it. You might be able to find partners who are naturally incentivized to send clients your way because of the results you offer.
Even with the 10% commission, agencies aren’t very incentivized, and we have to do a lot of work on our side.
We’ve come up with two co-selling strategies that work a lot better:
We’re working with LinkedIn to help their clients understand which ads are performing best using our platform’s API connection. LinkedIn sales reps are incentivized to send their clients to us because they end up spending at least 20% more on LinkedIn ads when they know what to invest in.
We still have our agency partnership program, but we switched our focus more toward implementation partners. These partners get a chance to implement our solution and charge us by the hour. They come to us with a client, and we don’t give them any commission, but rather a time-based job, so they can charge us for their time in addition to what their client is paying them.”
Laura Erdem - Sales Manager at Dreamdata
Crafting your ask for an introduction will always be critical, as no one just wants to refer simply to refer. The main way to navigate this is to leverage any of the existing contextual information that makes a connection to you relevant, give this to the person who has the relationship (with a templated message).
Honestly, it’s technically no different from how sales outreach should be today (highly relevant, specific, and contextual) but most sellers suck at doing this at scale.
Embed Partnerships in Your Sales Team
Imagine you’re a sales leader, about to make your first hire for your new team. You’d probably hire an Account Executive right? Increasingly, many sales leaders are hiring embedded channel and partnership reps as early team hires.
Rich Patterson, VP of Sales at MasonHub did exactly this, doubling down on partnerships in 2025. Rich realized that their network of ecosystem partners offered an easier sales channel than the traditional path of an SDR hitting the phones or sending cold emails.
“There are three main reasons why partnerships beat cold outreach:
1. The time to revenue is faster because the trust is there.
2. Conversions are higher because the relationship makes follow-through more likely.
3. The value of conversations is higher because the target account is a perfect fit.”
Rich Patterson - VP of Sales at MasonHub
Rich shared the key elements of his partnership strategy. The partnerships team operates separately from sales but is held to the same metrics.
What’s Next?
If you’re a sales person
Share this with your manager, see if it inspires any new ideas or tactics.
You can also start testing some of these on your own. Many of them (such as the mindset shifts, asking prospects and customers for referrals, etc) can be done without any tooling or impact on the activities you’re already being asked to do.
If you’re a sales leader
Start small, asking your sales team to start implementing things that don’t require any tools or process changes across the team. It may be worth taking one (or a small team) of your sellers and pushing them to try GTN selling methods for a quarter or two to see how they compare against what your other sellers are doing.
If you’re a founder
Consider implementing some Go-to-Network strategies yourself before bringing them to your team.
💜 Credits & Thanks
This playbook was created through contributions and insight from these wonderful people:
- Alex Buckles, CEO of Forecastable
- Stanton Quan, Head of Mid-Market Sales at Vendelux
- Scott Martinis, Founder and CEO at B2B Catalyst
- Adam Jay, Co-founder and CEO of Revenue Reimagined
- Christina Brady, Co-founder and CEO of Luster
- Rich Patterson, VP of Sales at MasonHub
- Roy Schuhmacher, Enterprise Sales Manager at HireVue
- Laura Erdem, Sales Manager at Dreamdata
- Darren McKee, Social Selling Coach
- Vin Matano, Founder at Creatorbuzz
- Aaron Ross, Sales Advisor and Author of Predictable Revenue
Sources
[1] Wharton School of Business
[2] Harvard Business Review
[3] Marketo/Adobe Experience Cloud
[4] IDC
[5] Influitive/Heinz Marketing
[6] Marketo/Adobe Experience Cloud
[7] LinkedIn for Marketing
[8] Influitive/Heinz Marketing
[9] LinkedIn for Marketing
[10] Forbes
[11] Forrester
Cheatsheets for you and your team
On the last few pages of this guide, you’ll find a series of cheatsheets that you can share with your team. They provide actionable summaries of various topics covered in this guide, including network creation, network activation, social selling and co-selling.
Get more warm intros and referrals from your network
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You bring your network, Commsor will help you create warmer revenue.
