How I activate warm intros to get 100s of leads

As an early stage company, the most helpful things that someone in your network can do for you usually boil down to 2 things - warm introductions to potential customers (sales) and warm introductions to potential candidates (recruiting).

One would think that if you have a large network or a lot of investors, you should be flooded with both of these types of introductions, but rarely does this happen unless you are very proactive about it while making this as easy as possible for everyone involved. The people who can help the most are busy and just not thinking about you all that much :)

Here is how we go about it at Journey :

1) I use Cabal , which is a tool that integrates with your Linkedin, CRM, and other manual uploads of contacts (advisors, investors, friends, etc). From there, it populates your professional graph that can be activated at scale.

2) Next, similar to how you should write cold emails, we put together templates with variables that are personalized to the individual based on their role, company, and how Journey might fit into their life. Depending on if they are the right contact at that company or the "ask" is to forward internally to the right person, some templates will include a forward-able email for them to easily shoot off. We will also add more personalization, but that comes later and is a bit manual.

3) Depending on how many contact nodes you've got from #1, it could get a little overwhelming, so I like to now pull in a list from our CRM dynamically or upload a target account list to use as the basis for who we want to get in touch with through our network.

4) Now we have a list of accounts and can see whom within our network is connected to someone at these target accounts. We also have templates ready to roll so we can fire them off. Usually my right hand ( Jason Tange ) will crank through a bunch of these sending to me asking for intro's to people at these companies. This is where the Stockton and Malone comes in- he is Stockton because he is shorter than me.

5) Since Journey is a product used to tell a story and equip a champion internally at a company to sell for you - it's actually the perfect tool to leverage in warm intro's as a lot of times our connection isn't the exact person we want to get in touch with so they need to forward internally. The Journey gives them just the right amount of ammunition to sell internally and in essence, showing your product is always better than telling people about it. We also can get real-time analytics on which content they spend time on to see what's potentially resonating after we hit send. Alas, you can probably just do a quick blurb that's relevant as well, but I like to go over the top and "do things that don't scale".

The challenges with this approach :

• "Connectors" - if you read Gladwell. inevitably you will have some people who are connected to literally every company (eh hemm Max Altschuler / Scott Barker ). In the above approach, you'd be emailing them 10-20x straight for different intros. Maybe this is OK, but you should probably give them a heads up and see if they are down for the cause as you don't want to be blasting the same person over and over.
• "1st degree connections but not really" -- Linkedin isn't a great barometer, because let's face it - we all have a lot of surface level relationships on here. So, a lot of time, your connections will just say "I don't know this person, not sure how we are connected on LI" -- not a huge deal, but this happens 25% of the time.
• "Time" - I'm the sworn enemy of spaghetti code and bad cold emails, which is why I love Gated (separate topic)- so I still spend manual time on personalizing these, so I'd say it takes 10+ minutes per intro. I'd probably be fired if I were an SDR for taking this long to send emails, but c'est la vie.

Who I think this can work for :

While I use it as an early stage founder for customer introductions. I actually think the use cases are pretty endless whether you are :

• In sales or BD at any size company throughout the funnel from pipeline generation to multi-threading a deal to expansion
• In recruiting at any size company for warm intro's to great talent
• Founders looking for investor introductions

Ultimately everyone should try to leverage their manager, executives, investors, or advisors to open doors faster. After all, we've all heard "let me know how I can be helpful."

Good luck and hit me up if you try this and it helps you - I could definitely use some more tips - still learning myself!