The Importance of Your GTM Network
As startups scale their go-to-market functions they should consider strategies beyond expanding human capital across sales + marketing. They’ll start to face competition from established players, and changing priorities in a rapidly evolving industry, which will create additional headwinds for a company that more than anything needs to focus on PMF. Most teams gravitate towards hiring but these challenges shouldn’t be solved by adding more people alone. Instead, one of the most powerful ways to scale while staying lean for flexibility is by leveraging your network to unlock new opportunities and drive growth.
A BDR only has so much bandwidth per day and with traditional thinking may find issues scaling beyond having additional firepower on his team. At Snag, we’ve maintained a lean team, bringing on just our second GTM hire 6 months ago. Our success lies in leveraging creative strategies to generate opportunities, with the most impactful being the activation of our network. Before joining the team, I had built a robust network in the Web3 space but put a stronger emphasis on my network over the last 2 years to drive even greater results for the company.
Ideal Profiles
You should approach building your GTM network with intention. Consider the individual's experience in the space, current role, company, and most importantly motivation. When building out my network I had to think, ‘Who gains the most from speaking/working with me’. This way I only connect with value-aligned individuals who, similarly, have a stake in maintaining a relationship with me beyond their day-to-day responsibilities. You’re creating a process. That remains true from planning out your ‘network building’ to how you manage/maintain it.
Building Process
I think CRMs are pretty standard, and don’t truly understand all the material on them out there, but consider having a basic CRM for this activity. Even an excel sheet will suffice. Track who your connections, last touchpoints, next meetings, events, etc. You can also think about creating tags to prioritize more important connections over others, and build stronger relationships with your ‘winners’.
Acceleration
Additionally, think of this network as a tool you can use when striving to hit ‘your number’ by the end of a quarter or month. Accessing this network as a lever to accelerate sales is not only a key input to your organization’s success but a massive differentiator in how you contribute to the company’s revenue targets. The one with the most tools in his toolbox always wins.
An additional topic worth getting into later is layering in incentives, and how to leverage a referrals-like structure to strengthen your ‘tool’ and push your network (in a nice way) to support your goals as needed. At times, this strategy has generated over 10 net new meetings per week, and without these incentives, we wouldn’t have become the self-sustaining company we are today.
Follow along here and on X if you’re interested in learning more about navigating sales in our increasingly digital world.
