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Small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy
Where GTM Leaders share their secret ingredients for modern pipeline generation—a flavor for every diet.
Andrew McGuire:
Today's guest is Silicon Valley's self-proclaimed go-to-market mad scientist, Richard Purcell. Back in 2014, Richard arrived in the valley from North Carolina with just his car and closed chasing what he calls the 21st-Century Gold Rush. Richard has a refreshingly contrarian view. Companies don't need more leads or tools, they need more consolidation and execution. His creative approach to sales and marketing has landed deals with giants like Airbnb Square and Live Nation. So Richard, welcome to go to Markets Facts.
Richard Purcell:
As I was saying before, I'm always hungry, so always be down for a stack.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, thanks for joining me on this and I appreciate you doing this because it is, I've been talking to a few other guests that I've had on the show just about how there's so much noise and it's really hard to break through. I was talking to Ratchet, who's the founder at Centralize and they've built it all in one platform. I was talking to Kosoglow, Mark Kosoglow about the great Ignore and it's noisy and the posts that you put together really made a lot of noise. And I'd love to just have you talk through a little bit more about what you mean and what you found around shortcuts for referrals because that is the warmest and the easiest for us to be able to generate pipeline in 25.
Richard Purcell:
And I think it's appropriate that he talked about previously you had a conversation with Mark, the founder of Operator, because what he talks about around the Great Ignore is really why I think it's so critical to lean on existing relationships as a means of cutting through the noise. Because as he points out, which I completely agree with, where we're reaching a point where no matter how good your outbound is, you're going to get ignored if there's not some kind of existing relationship or that message comes from someone you already know and trust. And I think we're just seeing that more and more people are ignoring all outbound no matter how good it is. And so even if it's powered by bots and you have the greatest personalization, it may not get through. And what we've seen consistently work is anytime you could lean on an existing relationship, and most people think that means getting the warm intro, but to your point around how we found a way to hack this is that you don't always need to ask for the intro in order to reference someone that there's mutual connections with. So I'll pause there and in case you had some questions.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, yeah, it's interesting that you bring it up how the play is run, right? Can I reference, so for example, since we're talking about Scott Barker, I know Max at the fund and I've known him for years. So can I go to everything in his connection and say, what's the play that's not going to piss off Max or Scott or whomever I know? What is the shortcut that you're thinking about and if it has anything to do with the Swarm partnership or if there's an independent of that.
Richard Purcell:
And so when I talk about leaning on existing relationships, let me just show this visual to help you think about what we mean because most people think, again, it's about asking for the warm intro, but what we're seeing is people think that they are only one individual, but if you really take a step back, your whole network can be tapped into in a way to be able to lean on these existing relationships. So I'll show you this one diagram here to just better tell the story,
Andrew McGuire:
But
Richard Purcell:
If you think a whole, think about a 360 view of your relationships and the core are people that you have the hottest relationships with. Those could be current coworkers, existing investors, people that I call besties, just people that you can really lean on. Got that from the All In podcast. But if you think Sluggly outside of that circle, it's about alumni shared former employer. It could be about membership associations. It could also be about leveraging loyal social media followers. And so it's about how do you map out all these relationships and then prioritize those relationships that you are, that get the most leads from and that you're going to probably have the most luck in capturing attention with.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay, got it. So how do I do that? I'm not Shaath or David Sacks to be able to just call anybody, but help me with the besties that seems like let's start there and then work our way out on how you would recommend someone do this. Because this feels like to me, this is the path in order to generate pipeline this year and it feels like a black box to me still. So help me with actual tactics of how we could do this.
Richard Purcell:
So a lot of people think that, oh, this kind of play is only for senior executives, but even as entry level SDR, you have to realize you work at a company that has all these relationships that you can leverage. And something that I talk about in the posts that you're referencing with Scott Barker is that it really comes down to messaging, data and strategy. And I first want to start with the data piece because I think where a lot of people get this wrong is they want to rely on LinkedIn connections as a source of how they think about relationships. But LinkedIn is not a relationship management platform. It's actually more of a content management system or just a lead gen tool. But if you are really thinking about how to measure strength of relationships, it's really more about work overlap. And so that's a hack that really anyone can do where if you're looking at mutual connections, start to assume that if you could see that a connector worked at the same company at the same time of someone, that's probably a good indicator of a strong relationship and that's something that you can do even through Sales Navigator.
So that's one way I would start that. It's all about the data.
And then the next piece I would say it's about the messaging, and this is what I mean about how a lot of people think they need to ask for the warm intro, but what we've seen work is referencing the connector in your outreach in a very soft cell way that really builds rapport and that first line of the email or in the subject line, and here's an example of something that we've seen work in our own strategies where the subject line is asking that person, did you work with this connector? And then the first line is really building rapport and talking about that connection that you have between the prospect and the connector. So you could say, Hey, I see that you work with Bob Clark at SalesLoft referenced the context of the relationship, and then go for the ask. Just a very soft sell approach and soft call to action.
Andrew McGuire:
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, because I'm looking at the post too here, which is saw you're connected to Jordan Crawford. Do you mind connecting this? I send you affordable blurb, right? Because the way that it's worked in the past with TeamLink being able to actually figure out who am I connected with? How can I ask for that? Or the executives at an organization or investors like give me the CSV file. I remember at Armor Blocks when I was working there, we had a spreadsheet of all the connections from the CXO suite and then everybody was logging in trying to figure out who can I get an intro to? And then all of a sudden you've inundated your executives versus what you're saying is being able to surface up this approach where it is softer, it's not asking for anything. It's an interesting approach. I haven't done this and it feels like this is an interesting way to do it. Is this a primary way that you're generating pipeline today from Moxie?
Richard Purcell:
I would say this is a primary way that we're generating pipeline for our clients. I think one position where a lot of our new business comes from inbound or creating content, but one example of this is we worked with this series a company that sells a platform to developers. And as you can imagine, if you sell to developers or engineers, if you think code outbound doesn't work for salespeople, it really doesn't work for engineers
Andrew McGuire:
Or security going after
Richard Purcell:
Security
Andrew McGuire:
Folks.
Richard Purcell:
Exactly. And the way this was leveraged for them is we looked at, because they have a PLG motion, so they have thousands of users, and then we segmented the most active users and we asked them if they wanted to be a referral partner. What that meant is that all we would do is reference their name in an outbound to someone that they had work overlap with. We found some beta testers who were open to being referral partners. And the way the messaging worked is it says something very similar. We're like, Hey, did you work with Richard? And then it says, Hey, I saw that you worked with Richard, by the way, Richard is an active user of our platform for DevOps. Quick blurb about their DevOps tool. And then the call to action was, would you like a link to do a trial? They saw that normally when they do outbound, it's about a 1% reply rate. This got a 10% reply rate, so like 10x of what was working.
Andrew McGuire:
Holy shit, 10% on outbound with that
Richard Purcell:
10% reply
Andrew McGuire:
Rate. Is that a case study that's referenceable or did they just make that has to be just a referenceable customer because that connector of saying they're using the DevOps platform could also be a risk to the existing client
Richard Purcell:
That they have? Well, so the people that opted in said it was okay to use their name.
Andrew McGuire:
We
Richard Purcell:
Did write a case study for this, I don't want to say the name of the company. They want to use it as their secret sauce, but we wrote a case study that shows step-by-step on how companies can do this
Andrew McGuire:
Themselves. Okay. Well, this is amazing, and I think this is the snack that I was looking for, which is how do we do one simple thing, one simple change on how you go about doing outbound, and I'm assuming is all this powered because in this post you mentioned the swarm is all of this powered with the swarm dataset?
Richard Purcell:
Yeah. So the swarm has this API, and they also have a SaaS product where you can be able to get the data that you need to run these plays. Where we are partnered with the swarm is we are the analytics on top of the swarm to kind of fill in the gaps around the data. And then we also work with our clients to run experiments on this and then convert that experimentation into a new growth channel. That's repeatable time and time again.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. Well typically, because I know we're at time, we're ending up turning this into a meal if we're not careful. So the closing question I always ask us is what's the number one belief about pipe gen in 25 the market has wrong and how should companies be thinking about this to unlock the next best opportunities? But I mean, you just told me the answer to that with this whole thing. So unless you want to go in a different direction or have a different belief about what that number one thing is
Richard Purcell:
That Yeah, I think the number one thing is that even the way that you opened this call was that it's not about more leads and more tools, it's about more experimentation. And you can't assume that just because a play worked for your peer, it's going to work for you. And no matter if it's referrals or thinking about intent signals, you have to run experimentation to find what works before you scale it. And so validation is really important.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. Well thank you, Richard. We'll wrap it up there. Well, thank you for joining me on another Go to Market Snacks episode, and this insight has been incredibly valuable and I know I'm going to go take this and run with it to try and figure out how I can experiment with it. So thank you for joining us and we'll see everybody on the next one.