Our goal for you today: Walk away with some practical examples of how you can create and grow a fruitful network.

In This Newsletter

• Getting Started with Go-to-Network

  • 6 Ways to Create and Expand Your Network

• ‘There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills’

Getting Started with Go-to-Network

Last week, we explored the two key components of a successful Go-to-Network strategy: network creation and network activation, with a focus on the latter.

Today, we’ll dive deeper into the former: how you can get started with a Go-to-Network approach by creating and growing your network – all without changing your entire process.

Go-to-Network isn’t a template, checklist, or a set of rules to follow. It’s a shift in mindset that involves changing the way we think about doing business.

Therefore, getting started with a Go-to-Network approach doesn’t mean you need to drop everything you’re already doing. It’s simply a matter of layering in warm elements to your current process.

Whether you are an SDR, AE, or sales leader, there are simple ways to get started investing in your own network and the networks around you.

6 Ways to Create and Expand Your Network

1️⃣ Create personal partnerships. Choosing to partner with people as individuals (and not seeing them as a ‘ticket’ to their company resources) opens the doors to building genuine relationships. Those relationships are what eventually lead to warm revenue through mutually beneficial efforts.

Instead of waiting for your entire org to adopt partnerships, leverage the connections you already have and explore personal partnerships. It could be as simple as inviting others in to create content or starting a small community with a peer. If you encourage this as a leader, you might even find more engaged sales reps as they watch their network bringing in tangible results.

2️⃣ Carve out space intentionally to try new things. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of prospecting, updating CRMs, calls, demos, and other activities.

Brainstorm new ways of building authentic relationships with your prospects. If you’re a leader, maybe it looks like this:

• Highlight one or two opportunities in each rep’s pipeline

• Meet with them and come up with 1-3 creative and human ways they can grow that relationship authentically, outside of outbound activities

• Decrease their required cold activity in one area for a limited amount of time and track one of those ideas as a metric instead

3️⃣ Give yourself elbowroom to be creative and human. Here’s the thing. Your prospects most likely love their work but chances are they’re not thinking about it in their free time. Build authentic relationships with prospects through shared interests and activities, even if it doesn’t result in an immediate sale. This long-term mindset builds trust and familiarity which are essential for the sales process.

For example, Ben Regier and Katrine Reddin play Call of Duty together in their free time and came up with an idea to start building relationships with prospects by inviting prospects who are also gamers to play a round or two with them.

4️⃣ Leaders, make your sellers a part of your brand. Buyers trust people they know for their buying decisions. Encourage your sellers to build personal brands and then actually support their efforts, like making videos or starting podcasts, as an investment in your sales pipeline and people-first strategy.

• Are any of your sellers good at making video content? Why not ask your company to invest in a camera or video equipment for them?

• Katrine Reddin and Ashley Coghill started Ashley & Katrine’s Infinite Revenue Playlist last year as a way to elevate women in the GTM space and Commsor helped stand it up.

5️⃣ Start a community. Create space for your ICP to gather and build relationships. Salesforce Trailblazers and Friends of Figma are great examples of this. You can even start niche communities for women, runners, veterans, book clubs, etc. Always remember that communities should never be built for lead generation. Trust is paramount in the sales process, and a community used for lead generation will destroy that trust in a heartbeat.

6️⃣ Leaders, set up your sales team to ask for referrals and introductions. Opportunities sourced through warm introductions are much more likely to close because the trust element has already been established through those existing relationships.

• With prospects: If a prospect likes what your team is selling but the sale can’t happen now for whatever reason (timing, budget, etc), empower your sellers to ask them if they know anyone else who would find what they’re selling valuable.

• Internally: Your CEO and executives have valuable networks. Coordinate your sellers with them to leverage these warm pathways.

Think of your network like a bank account. In order to make a withdrawal, you need to make deposits first.

Similarly, turning your network into pipeline (making withdrawals) first requires a focus on creating and growing your network (making deposits).

Pour into the people around you and give back relentlessly.

Until next time,

Mac🦕

‘There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills’

These days, creating and nurturing networks at the organizational level is vital to pipeline generation for two reasons:

1. Traditional outbound is becoming less and less effective. Noisy channels cause buyers to look for more human interactions.

2. Networks exist all around your business. From your CEO all the way to your customers, trust and relationships abound!

The revenue landscape is prime for something new.

Yosemite Sam once said, “There’s gold in them thar hills!” In the spirit of helping you find the gold in your networks, we created the Network Development Representative Playbook.

The playbook serves as both a resource to help leaders consider investing in network creation and growth, and a guide for their reps on how to do it.

Get your copy here!

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