How to build your pipeline using warm introductions

A step-by-step guide

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: