GTM Foundry is brought to you by Spiky.ai, a video analysis platform for revenue teams. Their AI models add emotional context so you can better understand if your customers are getting excited…. or losing interest.
Designing Your Company’s Network
Kick-starting revenue at $0 is tough. I’ve experienced this at 6 Series A startups now.
The most successful at kickstarting are those who are:
Relentlessly resourceful
Laser-focused on a defined ICP
Design & leverage their company’s network
Let’s focus on the networks and working through them intelligently.
Successful entrepreneurs think strategically when building their company network to help them reach their target ICP. These people and networks include:
Venture Capitalists
Angel Investors
Syndicates
Advisors
Executives
For example, If you’re a cybersecurity startup, you can optimize for players deeply embedded within the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) and broader security community:
VCs: Cyberstarts and Team8.vc are known for having large networks of CISOs who lend their expertise in the company-building process, including ideation, validation, Design Partnerships, advisory, and potentially becoming customers themselves.
Angel Investors: These could be CISOs, Executives of larger security companies, Account Executives, or Entrepreneurs. They’ll all have skin in the game and be inclined to help connect the dots.
Syndicates: Silicon Valley CISO Investments is a well-known syndicate of CISOs. Cyber Club London is another one.
Advisors: These could be anyone. For example, I’ve been a GTM advisor to several startups and have helped make introductions & recruit key players.
Executives: Optimizing for those who’ve operated in your industry goes a long way.
This leads me to how you can effectively leverage these groups, especially since reaching almost anyone has never been easier or required fewer steps.
Will 6 Degrees Become 2 Degrees?
First, a shot detour because I found the following pretty interesting:
We forget that the “6 degrees of separation” concept was coined back in 1989. Yet, most would assume this is still true.
That was 33 years ago. It’s outdated now that we 1) have the web, 2) people are more connected, and 3) we have social networks. The math has changed.
The following read explains: The World Is Shrinking: 6 Degrees of Separation Is Now 2
To summarize the key takeaways:
2011: Facebook analyzes 721M users and 69B friends and finds that on average, the degrees of separation were between 3.4 to 3.8
2016: Facebook now has 1.6B users. The average degree of separation falls to 3.57
If that trend continues to shrink lineally by 25% every time Facebook’s audience increases by 122%, by the time it reaches all 7.4 billion of the world’s current population, then the range would fall between an average of just 1 and 2 degrees of separation and connection between all people in the world.
It’s a bit hard to believe that we’d get down to 2. But you get the point. We should be spending more time to figure out connection paths to our ICP.
Okay, I went off on a bit of tangent. Let’s get back to the playbook you came for.
The VC Warm Intro Playbook
A key playbook in Pre-seed to Series A is to leverage your investor network for warm intros to your ICP. Some VCs even tout this as one of their main value adds, especially for VCs with a platform team.
It’s a great playbook if done in the right way.
However, most startups are doing it wrong. It goes something like this:
AEs make a list of dream accounts
Execs send the list to the VC with no context
Maybe 1 or 2 intros are lobbed back
The team questions why it’s not working
Of course, that’s not going to work. You’re leaving a lot of the work for the investor to do, and they don’t have the time to connect the dots.
How to Make it Work: The Email Forward
Make it easy for the investor to:
Know who to connect with
Make the connection
Provide the context behind the ask
Create a compelling to meet
Do all of the above in under 2 minutes
Enter the forwardable email. The play goes like this:
Research your desired company
Create a hypothesis for why the company needs you now
Find a current, relevant success story (from your company)
Find the right contact
👉Draft and send an email that your investor can forward 👈
Provide the email address and LinkedIn URL
Investor forwards the email and adds a 1-3 sentence commentary above your note
This sounds like a lot of work, but you can automate a lot all of it with Clay. Similarly to how I showed you how to automate Founder-Led-Prospecting in under 6 minutes in my last post.
I’ll show you this automation in my next post. Subscribe to get it when it drops:
Forwardable Email Templates
PLG Example (to get higher):
Hi John,
We’re seeing traction at [Target Company]. Several users are actively using [Your Software].
We’re looking to connect with [Exec Name w/ LinkedIn URL] as we believe there’s a strong fit and looks like this would be under his/her purview. They’d be a strong fit because [Your Hypothesis].
For more context - similar companies such as [Customer A] & [Customer B] also had [Problem 1] . They’ve turn to [Your Company] to:
[Business outcome 1]
[Business outcome 2]
I believe we can help [Target Company] achieve similar outcomes.
Would you be able to make an intro?
Thank you,
Alex
Of course, add your own character and writing style. But that’s the gist of it.
Non-PLG Example
You can use most of the same construct but a different opener and positioning.
Something like this:
Hi Maria,
There’s been much excitement, specifically in the [Your Industry], for how [Your Company] is helping VPs of Revenue Operations.
I bring this up as we came across your connection to [Executive Name w/ Linkedin URL]. [Target Company] is scaling its sales org and increasing its demand gen efforts. The challenges we see revolve around data quality and minimizing repetitive research processes.
Our customers [Company A] and [Company B] saw a 150% increase in data coverage and automate over 20 sales research workflows. We could help them achieve similar benefits.
Would you be able to introduce us to [Executive Name w/ Linkedin URL]?
Thanks,
Alex
P.s. looks like he/she is located in [Exec Location]. We’ll be there next week, so timing could be good.
If you have other examples, I’d love to include them in the post and tag you in.