Ep. 105 - Turning Personal Networks Into Pipeline: Inside the Relationship Intelligence Era with Drew Sechrist - Part 2
Ep. 105 - Turning Personal Networks Into Pipeline: Inside the Relationship Intelligence Era with Drew Sechrist - Part 2  
Podcast: Selling the Cloud
Published On: Sun Dec 07 2025
Description: In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Drew Sechrist, CEO and co-founder of Connect the Dots and longtime Salesforce veteran, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to unpack what it really means to build a relationship intelligence layer that changes how your team goes to market.Drew shares why his own career win stories at Salesforce led him to build Connect the Dots, and how mapping real relationship strength can turn stalled enterprise deals into closed revenue. He breaks down the nuance of activating networks at scale, aligning incentives around introductions, and embedding relationship data directly into the existing workflow so new processes do not die on the vine. From Monday pipeline reviews to executive access and stuck late stage opportunities, Drew explains how the best revenue teams treat relationship intelligence like the air they breathe.What You’ll Learn:Relationship Intelligence Fundamentals: What it really means to build a relationship intelligence layer and why it is a different go to market motion than cold outbound.Incentives and Activation: Why simply seeing who knows whom is only half the game and how incentive alignment, compensation, and context determine whether relationships actually get activated.Workflow, Not Side Quest: Practical ways to embed relationship data in tools like Salesforce, Slack, and email so managers naturally coach around it in pipeline reviews.From Story to Playbook: How one trusted introduction at Salesforce unlocked a seven figure deal and how that kind of magic can be turned into a repeatable team playbook.Modern Deal Strategy: How to use relationship maps and heat maps to unblock late stage deals stuck with finance, legal, or executive signoff instead of just hoping the contract gets approved.Key Topics:Building a relationship intelligence layer for GTM and revenue teamsThe nuance of relationship activation and incentive alignmentWhere relationship intelligence should live in the RevOps and sales tech stackUsing Salesforce embedded views, alerts, and APIs instead of forcing new UI and heavy change managementDesigning Monday pipeline reviews that start with “who do we know” and “have we connected the dots”Why LinkedIn connections alone are noisy and how signal based relationship scoring changes the gameMoving from manual “who knows who” exercises to scalable, AI powered relationship mappingGuest Spotlight: Drew SechristDrew Sechrist is the CEO and co founder of Connect the Dots and a former Salesforce executive who rose through the ranks during the company’s hyper growth era. His experience closing large, relationship driven enterprise deals at Salesforce inspired him to build a platform that operationalizes the power of real networks for modern revenue teams. Today, Drew helps companies turn hidden relationship capital into measurable improvements in win rates, cycle times, and deal size.Resources and Mentions:Company: Connect the DotsConcept: Relationship intelligence and relationship heat maps for GTMBook: The Tipping Point by Malcolm GladwellPlatform Ecosystem: Salesforce, Slack, email, and RevOps systems as primary surfaces for relationship data🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more GTM, sales leadership, and AI driven revenue insights from leading voices in enterprise growth. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.KK Anderson (00:31)And this really feeds into our second topic, which is around building that kind of relationship intelligence layer. What you've been describing, right? That is, it really is a different approach to like, to go into market. And so like, and if you think about like, let's say we do, you do this 90 day plan, it's working, like your team is,show this team that you're piloting this with is showing success. You build kind of the playbook and the process for how you could repeat it or scale it. Does this become something then that your managers start coaching? Does your pipeline meeting sound differently? What happens then?Drew Sechrist (01:08)Absolutely. So do anything except use our network to go to market. That's it. That's all we do. I can't actually say it's entirely true. It's like we do some events. We'll go out. I was at Dreamforce last week. We hosted the Salesforce alumni reunion. So we do things like that. But that's also kind of relationship based as well. But we don't do anything else. So we're kind of like this purist in this new motion.So the answer is absolutely yes. But I will say we don't have it all figured out yet. We have some of it figured out. The challenge, think, is really like.The challenge is a lot about protocol. Protocol and aligning incentives for everybody. Just because you can see everybody that knows everybody in the world and how well. Just imagine there's some magic way for you to see everybody that we collectively as a company know and all the people that they know and how well they know them so that we could say, great, Mark's got this really strong, looks like he's got a strong relationship with the CEO of this.Fortune 500 companies, let's leverage Mark to get to that person. How do you do that? Like it depends on, there's a lot of nuance. Who is Mark? Is Mark one of our senior executives? Is Mark an investor? Is he an advisor? Is he just a friend from the gym? Is he my neighbor? What are his incentives aligned with us? Is he a customer of ours? You know, like all of this.those things play into the, how do we activate Mark's relationship with this person? Just because we can see that it exists. That's, that's like, call it 50 % of game. But then the other 50 % of game is how do we actually activate this in a way that Mark feels good about that's going to be effective. That's going to, know, he's going to facilitate the introduction. one of the big challenges I think on this is like, the incentive alignment thing, like, let's just talk about compensation here.Let's talk about compensation for a moment, if I can take it that direction. If you really want to unlock the network, then everybody's got to be compensated somehow. Now, I don't want to be too capitalistic about this. I don't want to be too capitalistic because many moons ago when I was starting my career at Salesforce, it was around that time.I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. you've read it, KK. Mark, have you read that? Yeah. So deep in our brains, right? And I definitely identify it as a connector, even at that young age. And I was like, I'm a connector, and I love this. And so no surprise that years later, I started Connect the Dots. And I do make connections for,Mark Petruzzi (03:09)I certainly have,Drew Sechrist (03:25)Many like Matt, vast majority of the connections that I facilitate in my life are not, I'm not expecting any kind of, know, compensation for that. let's say certainly not any monetary compensation. might like, would, I might like, Hey, thanks a lot, Drew. That was really nice. You helped me out a lot here by introducing me to this person. I like that. makes me feel good. So.But if you want to do this at scale, you got to figure out like, what is the compensation that everybody's in the network is going to have? and it could be straight up, just, you feel good doing it. Like I'm a connector and I do feel good doing it. KK, if you wanted to get to get to somebody, let's say, totally random idea. Like you're, you're going to go to Dublin and that came up and you're like, I really wish I knew great.whatever pubs in this little town outside of Dublin, cause that's where I'm going to be. like, you know what? know somebody from that town. Let me introduce you to, I'd feel good. You go to some cool pub and have a great time. And that person that I connected you to probably would be like, yeah, that's kind of neat. Somebody's going to my town. And so my compensation on that one is, you know, it's, basically, it's a dopamine hit. I feel good that I've connected to people and their lives are going to be a little bit better because of that connection. But KK, if you hit me up like.40 times a day, every day for introductions to various people, for various reasons. At some point I'll break and I'll be like, KK, I got a day job, I'm sorry. You know, like I can't help you with, you know, 40 introductions a day. Now, if you hit me up with 40 at and say, Drew, I'd like you to make 40 introductions a day for me. And these are the introductions I'd like you to make. And it's good for the person that you introduced me to.And by the way, Drew, for every introduction that you make, I'm going to give you $10,000. I'd be like, hmm, all right, KK, you only want 40 a day? you like 50 a day? Would like 60 a day? I'll see what I can do. Right? So incentive alignment and compensation are important here, it's so nuanced. mean, think about it. Like, you're getting paid to make an introduction to somebody, you're a friend. That doesn't feel...KK Anderson (04:58)Yeah, or 400. Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (04:59)YeahDrew Sechrist (05:14)Right? Does it? You know, it feels, that feels wrong. Like if, he's, if KK you say, Hey, Drew, could you introduce me to one of your friends who is a good prospect for us? And if they buy, or even if they don't buy, I'm going to give you a thousand dollars or something like that. then I don't know. just, it feels weird. that feels weird. Now, if I were an advisor for your company, KK, you're CEO of company andYou say, Drew, it looks like you've got a great network into the companies that we want to sell to. would you be an advisor for us? We're going give you some equity and we'd like some advice from you. We'd like you to open some doors for us so that we can get in and sell our product and get feedback and grow and become a successful customer. That doesn't feel bad in the same way as getting paid with cash, right? so there's a ton of nuance here.Candidly, we don't have it all figured out yet. I think this is like this whole space is taking shape right now. It's like there are tools that are making it possible to leverage networks at scale like never before, but you got to figure out how to, how to activate those relationships and make everybody feel good about it and also incentivize.KK Anderson (06:05)Yeah.What's old is new. Relationships are old as time and here we are, right?Drew Sechrist (06:14)Mm.Mark Petruzzi (06:17)Yeah, so that makes perfect sense. this is, I love where this discussion is going. So let's just analyze a little bit. So everything we're talking about for most companies is a new process. And the adoption of new processes, they typically die if you can't get it into the core workflow. So how do you build this in? Like where should relationship intelligence live in the overallstack and the overall rev-up and what you're doing there so that you don't need to drive any heavy change management in this process. So what's the latest weight setup that still moves the needle that you work with your clients on?Drew Sechrist (06:54)Yeah.Yeah, that's a great question. I think it should be kind of like the air you breathe. It's everywhere. So whenever you're in any place that you would need this information, it should just be there and you shouldn't have to go look for it. So for example, our customers have access to us inside of Salesforce. Not everybody wants to use Salesforce, if you're using Salesforce, then you're looking at an account or contact. We have ourrelationship, your relationship data visible to you inside of Salesforce. So as you're doing your account planning, now sales managers are saying, okay, did we connect the dots? Literally, they'll say that and they'll look and be like, well, why didn't we use this contact here? So we have our board member knows the CMO has a strong relationship with the CMO at this company. Have we connected the dots there yet? And if the answer is no, then you just click the button and you initiate that request.And it gets routed through, however, it should get routed, it might get routed through your CEO to, the CMO of that company or whatever. so that's, that's one, other places that people work or Slack, either email, getting notified via email that you've got a relationship that you should be leveraging for a deal that you're working on. We do that. we also, we're launching an API shortly where your rev ops team will be able to put the data anywhere that you want.whatever that is, if you have a list in sales law for outreach or you've got some other single pane of glass that is the thing that you look at to figure out what's your next action with your target accounts, ConnectedOuts can just be one of the pieces of data that's on there that says, hey, don't be stupid here. Don't try to go cold into this account. You can get a direct introduction fromYou know your VP of finance who knows their CFO. And so just do that initiate that. So I think that the best way is not to have any new UI. We do have a UI that's no are tool as a UI, but I think the best way to do this is just not have any UI at all and just be where be wherever the users are already working.KK Anderson (08:48)makes a lot of sense and that sounds, that would be amazing, right? Gosh, this time has flown by so fast. I'm gonna move us along to the third topic and I'm afraid we're gonna run out of time. But let's talk about stories and playbooks and how we can turn some of these connections into outcomes. so I love a little story time. So like what jumps right out at you when you think about kind of a,a story where a relationship, changed the game and because of a relationship, because of a connection, then boom, an intro was made, like some magic happened and like what changed because of that? Cycle time, win rate, deal size, like give me a story.Drew Sechrist (09:27)Yeah. one story, one story was, from, early days at Salesforce we hired in, there's a really important relationship I made in my life was with my new boss who came in then was named Jim Steele. So that was probably 2004, if I recall correctly. And I just saw Jim at Dreamforce this week, caught up a little bit. Mark made Jim interview with a lot of people before Mark Benioff hired Jim Steele.And I was one of those people. so I love Jim at that point. I love Jim today. it was such a great decision to hire him. So I gave him, thumbs up, to Mark and then Jim, saw later in the hallways, like drew, I you gave me the thumbs up. Thanks so much. What can I do to repay you? And I was like, Jim, I'm so glad you asked that. And then I pulled up a, like, here's my list of accounts. These are my, this is my territory. Who do you know at these accounts?Mark Petruzzi (09:55)Mm.ThankDrew Sechrist (10:11)That's how you can repay me. And, we found, I won't name the names, but we found there's a large semiconductor company there that he had a friend at who was a very senior executive C level exec. and he's like, I know this guy right here. and I said, great, let's see if we can get in. So Jim picked up the phone, called him and we were in that senior executive's office the next week. Now I had been trying to crack into that account.I don't know, for the years, I don't know, for some long period of time, completely unsuccessfully. And then here we are sitting in the C-level executive's office, you down in the peninsula in San Francisco. And, and then, they had a conversation and I was kind of flying the wall and, know, I, basically was the errand boy on that. And I took all the follow-up notes and knew what we we had agreed to do next. And, but those two kind of, discussed everythingAnd there was a high level of trust between them because they'd both worked together for long time in the past. and next thing you know, a couple of months later, we closed a very large transaction. I think it was a seven figure transaction. And, that was amazing. It was totally transformative and like blew out my number for that year. And it was a deal that would not have happened just zero percent chance that that would have happened. And that, and I wouldn't say it happened a lot for me.But it happened enough where I definitely, at some point I'm like, am I any good or am I just lucky that I'm surrounded by these people that have these relationships? And then I was like, what? I really want to be good, I want to be master of my craft, but I could also just continue to be unlucky and this is okay too. And the commission checks still cash. so that is,Mark Petruzzi (11:27)youDrew Sechrist (11:40)a big part of the reason why I decided to go start this company, Connect the Dots, because that magic is out there. It's just waiting there. It's just hidden. You can't see it, right? And if you can just see that that relationship exists, then you can manifest.KK Anderson (11:47)my goodness.You are best equippedto help the person you once were and those experiences that provided you that unlock is what you're helping others to achieve.Drew Sechrist (11:58)Yeah.Yeah, bythe way, thanks if you're listening, Jim Steele, thank you so much.Mark Petruzzi (12:06)Well, that's interesting. So next time I speak with Jim, I'm going to have to see if you have given him his 5 % of the equity of Connect4Dots because that sounds like exactly when you came up with the initial idea here one way or another.Drew Sechrist (12:20)Yeah.Jim made plenty of money from all the deals that we closed together. He's fine. That guy's totally fine.Mark Petruzzi (12:28)That's true. Yeah, and Jim wouldn't want it. So no, that's reallycool. Okay, so let's make this even more real. Let's go even deeper. So, let's say it's our Monday pipeline review in an enterprise SaaS company. And we've got all these late stage deals stuck with finance, lots of middle stage activity, and we need more executive access. what should we do?right after that, how do we make that happen? And what are the top three actions you'd put in motion right away when you're at that point? I'm sure you do every quarter with your own company.Drew Sechrist (13:04)Yeah, I'm sorry that you're just like giving me these layups about connect the dots, connect the dots. That's this company. I mean, the thing we do all day, every day is, is at every stage of our sales process, we are looking to connect the dots. that was, know, David, David Nitsky from, from Salesforce came up with that phrase back in the day, connect the dots meant, okay, who do we know at this company? How do we get into this company?Mark Petruzzi (13:08)No, and that's exactly where this one's gonna go, I know that.Drew Sechrist (13:29)How do we get hired in this company? And we basically built the tools like our dream tool for solving this problem. The problem is, we can't get in everywhere. doesn't, it doesn't work in every situation. You cannot assume that you always have an in at every company and, to be able to get to every executive, through your relationships. But it's definitely the first thing you should check. Cause if it exists, then that's it. That's your, that's your Trump card. Good play.Right now, play it immediately. Boom. ⁓ So, you know, first thing we do is we check to see if we know anybody and our heat map of the relationships is connect the dots. So we can, and we'll go into, we can go into Salesforce and see, do we have any relationships via our network and our network to sort of clear is it's all of our employees. You can see all of them are bored, our investors, our advisors, all of our customers happen to be on connected. That says you may.Be aware because they're using connect the dots. So we can see through all of those networks, anybody that knows anybody and all of those scored relationships. So if a deal stuck and you're at two weeks out from the end of the quarter and you've got a champion, but you've never gotten to that C level executive that is ultimately going to sign off on it. And by the way, we do this all the time. It's like happening today in the background right now. we're seeing, okay, Hey, we actually.have this former colleague who is now on the board of this company. And they're on the board. So they know the CEO who's going to be the ultimate decision maker on this this deal. Send them a text message. And just ask them, this is in, it's with your chief. It's with the chief legal officer of your company. It's almost done with red lines. It's going to be on the desk of your CEO for decision. Could we get your voice of support on this?Or could you introduce us to the CEO so we can have that conversation? And if you don't have those relationships, all you're doing is twiddling your thumbs and hoping that like, I don't know, when it gets on the desk of the CEO, they're going to say yes and sign it versus no for some reason. So that is what I recommend you do. You need to have that relationship map. We're not the only thing in the world that does this. We're the thing that does it the best.So, and if you're not using Austin, at the very least use LinkedIn. YouMark Petruzzi (15:28)you can see that, I've signed up about a month ago. I've been in the system. I was in it again last night and today. And yeah, it's a lot from LinkedIn, but it just makes the whole process move even more productively.Drew Sechrist (15:43)we didn't really talk about exactly what it is connected. That's does. So I should maybe I should say just real briefly what we do when a when a company turns on connect the dots, they plug connected out into their email server. Then we analyze all of the historical email across every email account that they've got. And we look at the metadata and we score the relationships of all the people that they have. So if they've emailed with anybody,ever, and it doesn't matter what job they were, we analyze that and we build a score for each person. And anybody who's outside the company that's already using Connected Outs, which is a lot of people now, so like, a lot of VCs are on it, a lot of PE firms are on it, your investors, your advisors, you see who they know. They've done the same thing. They've analyzed all their networks. So all you're sharing with each other is who I know and how well I know that person.But that's it. That's it. And it's super powerful. So what you get is now instead of with like LinkedIn, you just get this binary result. Like Mark and Drew are connected on LinkedIn or they're not. And in that world, you can't really navigate and figure out like, can I leverage Mark to get to this person or not? Cause the failure rate is so high on LinkedIn. There's such a high noise to signal ratio. And that's the complete difference on connect the dots and connect the dots. You can laser target and I can seejust the people that Mark has a strong relationship with and never bug him about the other 95%, right? Just the 5 % that he really knows well. And what that does is you scale it across a large organization. That means that you really now have a heat map that gets you directly to the people you want to get to. So that's why you can do it the old fashioned way. You can use LinkedIn. can also, the really old fashioned way at Salesforce was just asking your colleagues around, like, hey, didKK Anderson (17:19)Whodo you know at this company?Drew Sechrist (17:20)Yeah, holdingup the list. That's I've been in a super old fashioned way. So there's like, you know, V zero, there's V one, you know, and now we're on, CTD is like V eight or whatever. don't know. but whatever you do figure, figure it out. Like you do need to connect the dots somehow. and you can do it manually or you can deploy technology to do it, but that is definitely the hack right now. And that is in a, in a very noisy world where there are too many messages from too many people that you don't know.KK Anderson (17:46)Mmm.Drew Sechrist (17:47)Basically, the answer is to all that stuff. You just delete everything right? The things you don't delete are if it's Mark sending me an email. I know Mark. I'm going read it. That's it.KK Anderson (17:56)It's so true.Mark Petruzzi (17:56)Yeah, and you know what, we're running towards the end of our time here and we don't wanna ask for any more of your precious time, Drew, than we already started with. But here's an idea. Would you be open to doing a LinkedIn live session with us where we go just a very deep dive into topic four and really talk about with all your great sales and sales leadership experience.how you're leveraging AI into everything, your product, your processes, your company.Drew Sechrist (18:26)Yeah, I'd love to do it. Count me in.Mark Petruzzi (18:28)Yeah,KK Anderson (18:28)And that willbe.Mark Petruzzi (18:28)I think that would be great as well. And then we'll do our rapid fire then as well. So we're not gonna share that rapid fire with you and give you all this time to prepare, because we wanna really see your reactions to it.Drew Sechrist (18:38)Beginner's mind. Allright, beginner's mind, I'm cultivating it right now. I will go into a deep meditative state until we have our LinkedIn live session.Mark Petruzzi (18:48)no better way to prepare. So Drew, thank you again. Thank you for taking the time with us. I think this was great. And we're really looking forward to diving into this next topic with you as well. And I'm sure our audience will be as well.Drew Sechrist (19:01)Likewise, Mark. Thank you so much, Mark. KK, a lot of fun.KK Anderson (19:01)All right, thank you, Drew.Mark Petruzzi (19:04)Awesome. All the best.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.