Cold outbound is dead. Warm intros are the future.

If cold outbound prospecting isn’t already dead, it’s on its last legs. A decade of martech innovation has turned email into an overly-saturated channel.

If you don’t believe me, look at this screenshot of my inbox. It’s 3 days of cold email from SDRs and AEs. There’s no way I can read it all, let alone respond to it.

The same low response rate holds for the cold calls. Unless your prospect’s day-to-day job involves answering the phone, guess what? They ain’t gonna answer the phone.

The only way to reliably cut through the noise and reach your prospects is to use your network for warm introductions.

On my recent podcasts, we’ve heard how sales leaders at companies both large and small have used warm introductions to enable their AE’s to source up to 50% of their pipeline themselves.

We’ve also heard how the conversion rate from outreach to meeting is around 25%, which dwarfs the 1-2% you see from cold emails and cold calls. Literally 10x more effective.

But doing warm outbound systematically across your sales team requires two things:

1. A database of warm connections—think of this as enablement.

2. A process for doing warm intros—because process.

Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Create a database of warm connections

1. Make a list of all the well-networked folks in your company. The list should include all of your execs, investors and advisors and any other leaders that are likely to have relevant contacts.

2. Have your CEO ask each person on the list to download their LinkedIn contacts and send them to you as a CSV file. This saves everyone having to connect with everyone else directly on LinkedIn.

3. Create a google sheet called “Warm Connections”. Import each person’s contacts into its own tab and delete the email and connected on columns to so that all that remains are first name, last name, position and company.

4. Add a column to each tab called Contact Owner and populate the rows with the name of the person whose contacts are on the tab.

5. Download all of your accounts and account owners from Salesforce and import them into a new tab in the same google sheet.

6. Combine the data from steps 3 and 4 into a single mondo tab. Use the QUERY() function to bring all the contacts into the same tab and use the VLOOKUP() function to bring in the account owners.

7. On a new tab, create a pivot table on your mondo tab with account owner and account as rows and count of contacts as values. Sort the account owner row by name and the account row by count of contacts desc.

8. Add a pivot table filter for account owner.

9. Add a Contact Info tab listing out the contact owners and their contact information.

10. Make your google sheet read-only.

Liking this post so far? Then please subscribe! I write weekly how-to guides to help you build pipeline, close deals and grow your customers.

2. Create a process for doing warm intros

1. Have each AE (and CSM) make their own copy of the Warm Connections google sheet. This prevents accidental edits to the original copy.

2. Filter the pivot table to show just the accounts they own.

3. Start with the account at the top of the pivot table (the one with the most warm connections). Double click on the number of contacts to create a new tab, which will list all the contacts for that account.

4. Scan the new tab for contacts that match your buyer persona and note the note the contact owner (i.e. the person who can make the warm intro to the contact).

5. If you don’t see a match for your buyer persona, look for another executive to use as a backup.

6. Use LinkedIn to search for additional buyer personas and make a note of them.

7. Send the contact owner an email asking for an intro to the contact in the

   1. A note to the contact owner requesting an intro to the contacts that match your buyer persona, referencing that you saw they were connected and including a pre-drafted email (see next point).

   2. A pre-drafted email that the contact owner can either cut and paste into a new email or simply forward as is.

8. Repeat steps 3-7 for each account. Don’t try to do them all in one day, as you don’t want to overload your contact owners.

9. As soon as you get the intro, follow up with a lightly personalized response thanking the contact owner for making the intro and suggesting some times to meet in the next two weeks.

10. Keep track of all requests that you’ve sent. An easy way to do this is to add the contact owner to your CRM.

11. Expect 50% of your requests to result in a “I don’t really know that person” (c’est la vie on LinkedIn) but equally expect half of the other 50% to result in a warm introduction!.

But really? A Google sheet?? Bruh…

Yes there are some drawbacks of doing this in a google sheet. But hey, at least it’s not an Excel workbook, right? Seriously though, here are some problems you’ll run into and how to mitigate them:

1. Version control — to maximize the results, you need to make sure everyone is using the latest version of the google sheet. Two tips I’ve seen work:

   1. Use your weekly sales meeting to notify the team of updates to the data set.

   2. Summarize what the updates mean for them e.g. “50 accounts now have 5 or more contacts”

2. Performance — once you get over 50,000 contacts, the google sheet really slows down. The best thing to do is to remove any contact owner(s) that aren’t proving valuable (which you can see from tracking activity as described above).

3. Workflow integration — you have to jump between LinkedIn, Salesforce, Gmail and the Warm Connections google sheet to pull off a warm intro but for a 10x lift in conversion rate, it’s worth the payoff.

How else are you guys doing warm intros? What tools are you using? I feel like this is a space that is ripe for innovation.

If you found this post useful, please share it with a colleague! And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing! Thank you!!