Episode 328: Why the Human Touch Still Matters in an AI-Driven World with David Connors

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Welcome, everyone, to the B2B revenue executive experience. I'm your host, Carlos Nochain, and today we're talking about the power of human relationships in the era of AI sales. And to help us out with that, we have David Connors, CEO and co founder of the Swarm, a new kind of GOTA network platform providing companies and investors the keys to their extended networks and the relationship data they need to accelerate sales, recruiting, and fundraising. David, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Carlos. Great to be here.

All right, David, to get us started, same question we ask everyone. What's something that you're passionate about that those that only know you through work might be surprised to know about you?

Something that takes up a lot of my time outside of work is I'm a dad to two young kiddos, two young boys. They're six months and three years old. So I spent a lot of my time watching Bluey, the greatest Australian export that we've been watching. A lot of. It's great.

Sounds like you don't get a lot of rest. They keep you young. That's a good part. So, David, tell us a little bit about your career and what got you here. What was journey to success?

Yeah, I'm from Australia originally. Been living here in the bay area almost 10 years. My last startup was actually acquired by Sequoia Capital. It was an outbound recruiting automation company. I started off in the growth world, so doing growth hacking, setting up inbound and outbound funnels and working directly with founders. They're like, actually the biggest pain point at the moment is just hiring the engineers that we need to build a product before we can start selling it. So can we use some of these, you know, growth tools and tactics? On the recruiting side, I was actually using, you know, outreach IO and doing outbound for recruiting that got acquired by Sequoia. They wanted it in house, and we're thinking about building something similar, and it was a really unique opportunity, so we took it. I was then a founder in residence there for a couple of years, building them other tools to increase the firm's productivity. And as I was doing that, ended up building this network mapping tool with the data science team and a bunch of other folks there internally. And that was the foundation for my latest venture called the Swarm, which helps every company to be able to map and leverage the network.

It's interesting because in this day and age of, you know, I guess the flurry of AI conversations, it seems that we're focusing more and more on getting the human out of it. And when I first met with you, it's really about human touch, it's really about this human connection. So I'm finding the topic interesting. What got you into this era, you know, this focus on this whole human touch side and then using AI to enhance it.

So the way I see the world evolving is that there's going to be more AI assistance, more AI tools that will help to do the low value tasks that humans don't like doing and free us up to do the more high value tasks which we're really good at. And in particular for the sales and kind of revenue function. There's a great piece actually by Mike Marg from CRAFT who's just saying that there's like a thousand micro interactions that happen in the sales end to end process from the initial research and finding in the top of funnel then all the way through to actually closing the deal. And there's no way you're going to just hand that over to an AI to handle the whole thing. There's too much trust that needs to happen, especially for higher ACV deals. So where is the human in this world of AI that's swirling around? And I think it's that every human, you know, has this AI assistant little helper that can do a lot of this, you know, sort of heavy lifting in the background. But at the end of the day it's still going to be humans talking other than humans. If I'm, you know, a buyer and I have some high sav deal, my neck's on the line for this new product or service that I'm bringing in New York. I want to trust that who I'm buying from is a human that's going to be accountable. I don't want to just deal with a robot. So that's one sort of aspect of it. And then I think the other aspect is that as the proliferation of generative AI tools increase the noise in the ecosystem, the importance of human relationships is going to be more critical than ever as people are going to want it learn and be educated from other humans and that trust that exists. And there's even more things we can talk about with the whole go to network playbook that we're putting together. That is the natural evolution from where we've come with the predictable revenue go to market playbook. But we can kind of dive into that later.

I'm writing myself a note so I don't forget. So David, I couldn't agree with you more about this human connection. In fact, when people talk about jobs being lost due to AI go. If your job is basically to push a button to send an automated email, you know what, you're not adding much value. Of course your job's going to go away because you're not very productive. We can automate that when the person actually responds back or you set up that phone call that I think that human and human connection is so valuable. Now some people were telling me they all know Carlos, we could listen to questions and responses and through AI respond accordingly. Is that human touch going away anytime soon?

I think there's some things that the AI is really good at, right? Which is like processing large amounts of data. And some sales roles historically have been focused on that. Looking at web research, looking at reports that are coming out from companies, looking at news and sort of putting together this reasoning or this sort of understanding of this account. But that is a very limited part of the entire end to end sales job. Right. In particular the entire revenue function. So there's some of these research and some of these activities that I think the AI assistants can help us with. But there's still a huge amount of the job that in my opinion isn't going anywhere.

I'm with you. I think especially if we just look at the next three to five years to come. Because sometimes I get people go, oh no, five, five years, the roles are gone. I go, I don't know what's going to happen in five years. And the short term it doesn't feel like it. So let's go back to this go to network. What do you mean by go to network Playbooks or you know, what does a go to network approach mean?

So maybe taking a step back the world that would sort of come from this growth at all costs, zero interest rate policy, ZIRP era where you could kind of just throw more money at the problem and build this machine with more and more humans to increase the touch points of the org with your prospective buyers. And you just be scaling this up. The advent of these mass emailing tools and power dialers and the ability to really spray and pray your message onto the market and sort of saturate all of your prospective buyers. This has sort of reached this critical tipping point where then buyers inboxes and voicemails which is flooded. I don't know about you. But you know, I get all these messages all the time on LinkedIn. My inbox is just flooded with all these very undifferentiated, not personalized, cold emails and I just delete them. What then happens after that? Right, so then now money's gotten more expensive. Again, people have thinking through how do we build these revenue orgs in a more efficient way? And we've got to be able to also do this in a way that cuts through the noise of all of the spray and pray tactics that are kind of out there. So the Go to network approach looks at your relationships that sit around your company. So it's not just your team's networks, but it's also your investors, your advisors, your partners, your vendors and suppliers, definitely your customers. And then also things like the candidates you're talking to, the alumni at your company. When we start thinking about all the different people that sit around your organization, there's actually a lot of networks that you can start tapping into. So the first step is just mapping that and just understanding, just revealing all the relationships you can tap into and understanding what's a weak relationship, something what's our strongest, closest supporters and allies, who are the besties of our firm that we can be really leaning on and then thinking through, okay, are the different use cases and how can we be leveraging those relationships in the most effective way. So a few examples. You know, there's lots of different plays. One classic example is let's find some warm intro pods into our target accounts. So rather than saying we've got a thousand accounts for the quarter, we're now just going to hit them with cold email, cold calls and social touches. Instead, we're going to carve out the top 30, 40%. We actually have a pretty warm relationship into that account, maybe directly with our ICP that is just one hop away. So we send an intro request to someone on our team who used to work with them or one of our investors or one of our customers. And it's a very easy ask for them. They make the intro request, you then get introduced. It's a 5 to 10 entire conversion to meetings than if you're going to go cold to that prospect because you have the trust, the relationship is already there. You're not doing anything other than just leveraging the relationship. There's a bunch of other players we can talk about, but that's just one to get us started.

That's a great one. And statistically speaking, a warm introduction is always much more effective than anything else, including a cold Call. So part of our audience are people in these XDR roles. I said XDR because some people call them BDRs, SDRs. There's a million names for them. But if I'm them, I'm listening and go, hey, they're. This is going to really affect or this could really affect my role. How does your technology affect that business development function than within organizations?

They're the perfect person internally to be looking through all those warm intros and to be doing that identification of hey, one of our investors is connected to one of these target accounts that I'm working on. So rather than going cold with an email campaign, I'm going to then craft this nice message that's going to get sent to our investor. Maybe I ghostwrite it on behalf of our founder or CEO or in someone else. And there's these different creative ways that you can actually engage these leads, but just takes a little bit of time. So that's a great way for an XDR to be able to use their time effectively. I think the second thing I'd say is start to build your own personal brand audience. It's never too early to start this. And for every salesperson, every individual contributor, they should be thinking about how can I build trust and scale with my prospective buyers? And this could be starting to write on LinkedIn posts, doing some Twitter posts, writing some content and talking in their, in their own network, in their own community. And this is also a way, by the way, for sales managers to empower their team, maybe build this into the KPIs, carve out some time for them every week to be doing this. And it's going to help the whole org to actually not just build their audience and build their network, but engage with the prospective buyers and build that trust at scale.

So it sounds good. Do you have any success stories of people using this go to network and what kind of results they've got?

A good example is a startup called Ripe. They were looking at figuring out how to leverage their network. How to and they were doing the classic using some mass emailing tools. Just called Outbound and joined the swarm to map their network and then started leaning on their investors and their advisors. They've got a lot of these investors and advisors that weren't being utilized at all. They've 2x the top of their pipeline within the first couple of months and they're on track to double that over the coming months as well.

All right, so from my background a little bit, you know, after I had my run in the ERP space I switched over to the CRM space and especially in the early days, my joke used to be that people would buy it, they couldn't even spell it. But in all honesty, the CRM space was great for my career and I learned a ton. You know, eventually the space kind of matured and you know, we really had to deliver a value prop. But one of the struggles that I still see today in CRM is delivering on that true relationship management. Is the swarm part of that evolution.

Yeah, it's a good way to put it. The R in the CRM was kind of missing from these, you know, legacy CRM tools. Great as this shell of a system of record that you could enter all your data into, but didn't really have a true representation of all the relationships of your firm, nor a good way to keep those strong and to be checking in and nurturing that network. So that's the next generation of CRM is what we're building and there's a few other tools in the market as well who are helping to bridge that gap. It's not just interactions with your customers and building a pipeline, but it's really the entire network that sits around your company and all the relationships that you have, which is just, yeah, a lot more interesting for everyone rather than just doing data entry of logging your call notes then be able to see actually the whole firm's relationships is way more interesting to look at.

Yeah, there was a, I can't remember her name at top of my head, so that's my bad. But it's network has really come up a couple of times on the podcast. But one of the lines that this one of our guests had was that your net worth is directly tied to your network. So is the swarm a way to really uncap the power of your network?

Yeah, it's a good way to put it. I think for some firms the network could be actually the greatest asset that they have. It's this defendable moat that you can leverage that's proprietary, that's just for your firm that your competitors can't imitate or compete with. Especially when you build these authentic relationships with your buyers over a long term sort of game. And you're not playing these transactional short term sort of games, but instead you're building these deep, authentic relationships. You're helping them by educating them, by building trust over time. And when they're finally ready to buy and they enter the market and that 3% of the market, whatever that's kind of ready, you're going to be benefacto number one, pecking their mind they've been hearing from learning from you and you know, it's then your business to lose, so to speak.

I want to double down on when you said authentic relationships, because I do think sometimes people are running so fast and so quick, especially in this hunt for revenue, that we become more transactional and we don't take the times to build personal relationship with folks. We don't take the time to understand not just the business outcomes for the company, but what are the personal outcomes for the individual. Because I believe if you make that linkage, you can can create raving fans forever. So not only someone that will renew and buy more from you, but hopefully will recommend you to 10 other people. Will the Swarm help me maintain those relationships in any way?

Yeah, it's a great point. Sort of from not just closing revenue and getting the customer in the door, but to actually converting them into an advocate and a champion of what you're doing. To referring more business than that. That's a great flywheel. As we're sort of building out the platform, I think that's something we're going to be definitely focusing on in the future. We're still getting started, so we're just sort of focused on at the moment mapping your network, figuring out those warm leads, plugging in your CRM and other tools that you use every day, piping the data where you want, and then in the future also then focus even more on that sort of nurturing the network, keeping those relationships really healthy and strong and doing that in an authentic way. As you said, looking forward to jamming more with you on that in the future.

I won't charge anything for my great ideas. So you mentioned it earlier. There are other people that have tried this space before or that are trying it again. In this day and age of AI, what has stopped folks from really making this successful in the past, making it successful today?

I've seen a few attempts of this in the past and I think what I learned and I talked to a lot of founders of these companies who attempted it and investors, you know, who may have invested in these previous dead bodies in the water.

Early iterations.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean there's. Yeah, it goes back decade or more, you know, but there's a few recurring themes. One is everyone appreciates the value and the, they understand the concept and the ROI of, of leveraging your warm relationships over going cold. It's just there's so much evidence and data that backs that up. The problem has been in the past that the data Just wasn't there to be able to build this. Now obviously there's LinkedIn and LinkedIn has evolved in their strategy where that sort of moved away from being a place to manage and organize your relationships, which is where it started off as. Now people are connected with thousands of people. Being a connection on LinkedIn isn't a true relationship. It's not a true signal that I have a relationship with someone. What it's formed into now is more of an audience building platform and it's great for that function and that use case, but for those who want to actually have a good understanding of their relationships, it's pretty limited. Second thing is that LinkedIn isn't the only place where you have relationships. You have relationships in your email and your calendar. You have your previous colleagues that you've worked with. You have relationships offline as well. So there's not a unified platform that gives you this view of all of these relationships in one place. And in the past the data just wasn't available to be able to do that. Second thing is with the recent GDPR and CCPI regulations, they've now broken open these gatekeeper platforms which used to have the to a stronghold on the user's data and wouldn't share it with anyone else. You know, we're able to leverage those regulations as well, which are also in our theta trying to break open those gatekeeper platforms, allow the user to access their own data. And then finally, I think the depth of the data that's been available on previous platforms just hasn't been enough. It's been too shallow and it's also been sort of too narrow in the use case with all those learnings. And we've built the platform from the ground up with the latest data that's available and we're kind of building on the shoulders of giants, so to speak, in terms of being able to take the best of LinkedIn and the best of some of these other platforms like Salesforce and some of these other CRMs, and combine it into sort of next generation platform that our customers are really happy with. We're working really hard to make it even better.

So David, when we first met, you know, I went out and I checked it out. So I'll give you my big personal concern and again, you can call me old school because I am in some ways and that's really about privacy and security. And I look at this, a platform like yours, you're asking me to open up my private network. So not only my LinkedIn, my email, my calendar, I mean it seems like the more sources I give it, the better the data is going to be. But it also, let's face it, I'm partially paranoid here. I, I'm like, oh my God, I just gave you the keys that were the kingdom. How do you deal with the whole privacy and security side?

It was a big question mark when we started this, which was like people even got to connect their accounts because we had those real concerns as well. And what we've learned is that it's less than 5% of users who are invited to the platform that declined to share their email and calendar. But almost everyone is comfortable sharing their LinkedIn because it's basically public anyway. If I'm connected with you on LinkedIn, I can see all your connections. People aren't that sensitive or Precious about their LinkedIn connections anymore. And then the previous work colleagues that you have, again, there's sort of publicly available information you don't have that actually mapped anywhere. That's something that we offer as part of the platform that we're able to pull all those previous colleagues for you. So it's actually quite a magical, so delightful experience. And in terms of email calendar, you know, we're just focusing on work relationships. We're not going to send a message to your family or your grandma, she's not going to be on the platform. So that's, you know, another way. And then, you know, there's, there's more fine grained privacy and security controls and you know, we're building this in a very secure way, that it's just your own private curated database of your relationships. It's not shared with other users or anything like that. So we've jumped through a lot of compliance hoops with a lot of very security conscious customers and we've been able to pass and fulfill all of their requirements, which has been great.

Now, in a work environment, for example, if we all work together for an organization, a startup, if you will, we'd be asking our board members, our investors, our executives, our employees to all come together as a swarm, I guess. Did I understand that right?

That's right.

And even though we're sharing some email and stuff like that, when you're looking at some of the stuff, you're not looking at people's emails, you're just looking at the connections that they're making with folks, correct?

Yeah. So we're not actually reading any of the body of the emails or any of the subject lines or any of the private or sensitive information that's included in the inbox, which you know, that was a deliberate, intentional decision to allay those concerns, as you said, especially when you're getting these external networks on. So where investors are joining advisors, you know, but we have folks who invited all of their customers in, and those are some of the richest networks and you want to make sure that they feel comfortable joining. The other thing you can do is also add the work overlap connections without requiring the user to sign up. So this has been our latest innovation called AI Network Mapper. It pulls from our own database of 800 million profiles, and we can see the employee graphs of every company who worked with who at the same time. How long was the overlap? Was it a month? Was it two years? Was it the same function, the same location? There's a lot of intelligence that goes behind the scenes into calculating those work overlaps and ranking everyone by the connection strength score. But we can do that for everyone at the company without needing them to sign up. So that's a really great way to get started. You can kind of see your company's relationship graph with all these work relationships and, you know, only takes a few seconds and it's very quick for us to do that now.

Yeah, I would think. And this is, I guess, getting nitty gritty, but it'd be kind of interesting to be like, hey, David, it looks like you emailed this person about six months ago. I don't know what it was about, but the last connection you had with them was back then. It doesn't have to be about buying their company or anything secret like that, but it could at least you know how recent the connections are. Is that a fair use case?

It can be, yeah. We, I mean, we don't display that data actually on the platform. We, you know, we're intentionally, again, not showing the sort of number of interactions, recency, that kind of stuff. It's more just like, Carlos, have you been in touch with this person? Yes. Are you also connected on LinkedIn? Yes. Did you used to work together? You know, and all these different inputs just sort of flowing together? It's an interesting idea. Some customers want to have more detailed interactions, you know, the frequency and recency in inbox. So maybe we'll give that option for folks in the future. But again, you know, just a small team and we have to prioritize what we're building. So maybe in the future.

Yeah, that frequency and recency sounds like it would be interesting, right? Because then you, if you think down the line it's, hey, I haven't talked to this person in a year or I haven't talked to this person in five years. I just pinged an old colleague of mine. We worked together over 16, 17 years ago. The only thing that let me that I Talked to them two years ago was when I messaged them over LinkedIn. I could see when the last time was that I messaged them.

Yes, that's a good idea. Personal network management. I like that.

It's a whole new module to your system.

Yeah, that makes sense. You know, we're sort of focused on companies at the moment, but we're going to be expanding into the individual personal network management use case in the not too distant future as well. So keep those ideas coming. I like it.

It might open you up to the whole B2C side. I mean, I, I think about my sweetheart who's in real estate. She's got a whole to manage. You think about people in insurance or other financial services type functions. They have a network to manage and if they could pull it all together, it'd be a nice asset for them, especially as they move from company to company.

That's exactly the intention, you know, that you should have your own small map. You can take it from company to company and you know, it's not just a fit for tech companies. We have a lot of other industries and other folks who are using as well, from higher education to consultancies to financial services to even some construction and other folks. So it's the, you know, the same kind of concept across industries. Let's leverage our network, find warm intros and then that's going to be a much more effective but also more delightful way of doing business rather than spraying, praying everyone that I know.

All right, so given the state of the product today, and I know it's growing and getting better for companies, that'd be interesting in trying it out. What would be some of the first steps you'd recommend for them in connecting their networks?

Step one is map your network so you can get all of the relationships that your firm has access to, both your internal networks, but then also your investors, advisors, customers, partners, suppliers, everyone you know, anyone you can think of that might want to help you out. And again, you don't necessarily have to invite them all into the platform. You can map the network using the AI network mapper and you know, pull all their work connections on their behalf without notifying them that they need to sign up to anything, which is great. And then I think the second thing is just this sort of mind shift change of the how you define your icp. You know, I'd sort of say, you know, it's not just about these customer fit signals and demographics as well as these intense signals, but there's also this, you know, relationships aspect, which can then help you to prioritize your targeting and then carving out the warm target accounts and then engaging your network and your relationships to help you to set up more meetings and to close business faster.

All right, David, you got me. I'm going to go back in there and fish around some more. I started it. I didn't go very far. I got. I either. I got a little freaked out about the whole security thing and I knew I was going to talk to you today, so I'm going to go jump my toe with my big toe in the water. David, you've had a great background and one of the big things I believe about in the podcast is people learn from other people and their stories. Closing this out, I got a couple of questions for you. One is what might have been one of the biggest missteps or challenges in your career where you learned the biggest lesson?

I think for me as a leader and as a business owner, when I first got started, I was trying to just do too much by myself. And I think this is a trap that a lot of early stage founders fall into, where I was doing everything, all the operations, all the hr, the finance, the bookkeeping, because I didn't want to pay anyone else to do it. I was really scrappy. But then I was spending 50% or more of my time on these pretty low value tasks and I was busy, but it was busy work. You know, it wasn't really the highest leverage way to use my time. So then as I've got more experience and sort of more rep to doing this, I really think, like, how can I outsource almost everything? Either delegate it to someone internally, delegate it to a contractor, just automate it if I can, or just entirely remove it. There's a great Harvard Business Review article. The sort of magic of getting things done. Recommend that just have a look at sort of, you know, these different ways to manage your time. But that's a big trap that I see other founders fall into is just not outsourcing and delegating fast enough and trying to do too much yourself. And by the way, I mean, you don't burn out and your wife will be happy with you as well.

I had the same challenge, David. In fact, I just finished this book on vacation called 10x and it's, you know, going from 1x 2x. You know, if you want to go from 1x to 10x. You really got to do less and do more with the time you do have. Right. Kind of really focus on the things you're good at. I haven't figured it out yet, David, but I'm trying so I think that's a real good one. All right, last question. We call it Acceleration Insights. What might be that one piece of advice? Be a business or personal that you would share with our listeners that would help them grow their careers and maybe be as successful as you have been for me.

So it comes back to this topic of relationships and just try to be more intentional and authentic with the relationships you're building and have this long term view. It's just a bit of a mindset shift. But think in terms of decades that we'd be working with people versus just the next few months. And rather than trying to just hit, you know, next quarter's quota, think about how it can be working with this person over many different companies over the rest of our life and you. Yeah, it just sort of opens up a lot of interesting opportunities, a lot of other kind of win creative opportunities as well.

So David, if people wanted to get in contact with you and learn more about yourself or the Swarm, what might be the best way for them to engage with you?

I'd say probably on LinkedIn. Pretty active there. Try and post regularly my latest thoughts. So connect with me on LinkedIn. And the swarm is also on LinkedIn.

I can't thank you enough for being our guest today. Great insights. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Thanks again, Carlos. It's been great chatting with you.

All right, to close us out everyone, and that's it for this episode, please check us out at www.b2b revexec.com or just check us out on your favorite podcast platform, be it Spotify or Google or itunes. I'm Carlos Noche. Until next time, I wish you nothing but the greatest success.

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