Turn your Networks into Sales with David Connors

So, like me, I bet you've had loads of emails in your inbox already today from people you've never heard of about things you don't understand because they're so badly written. And then you spend all your time faffing around, unsubscribing or trying to get rid of them, then they reappear again. It's just wasting your time and ultimately theirs because this, you know, who's going to respond to something like that? So the traditional spray and pray method, as my guest on this week's show, David Connors from the Swarm, describes it, David's got a great idea to overcome that and we're going to learn all about that, how to do that, how to use the relationships that you have in all contexts to grow your business. Sales. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Better presentations More Sales podcast. My name is Trevor Lee. We're at episode 311. So if you're new to the show, well, big, big welcome to you. Where have you been for the last six years or so? So if you are new to the show, you know, please don't think you've got to go back to episode number one. I would advise, definitely don't do that. If you look down all the names of the shows, they will give you a clue as to what to look out for. So I'm very fortunate that in that time I've had some amazing guests. So pick and choose the bit. It's like a library, as someone recently said to me. You can just go through and you pick the episodes with a title that you think will be a benefit to you, but ultimately it's all about helping you deliver better sales presentations better, presenting yourself better. And if you're doing sales pitches as well, then it'll help you create more sales. So we've got a great guest on the show this week, David Connors from the Swarm. But before David comes live, I just must mention that very excitingly, I finally, because some of you have heard me mention this, got my online presentation courses live on a website. We've got our own website now, it's called onlinepresentationcourses.com and on there there's a whole course called Transform your business presentations. It's quite big, but you go at your own pace with an online course and some people prefer that. They don't want someone like me coming in and you having to sit around the table with loads of colleagues, you know, and go through all the role plays or whatever. It might be much better that you learn how to deliver great Presentations in your own time. And then you rock up into your business or to your client and you are transformed and they go, wow, how did you learn to do that? So that's what the online courses are all about that I've produced for you. So the main one is called Transform your business presentations. Now I'll put a link in the show notes, but if you go to the website onlinepresentationcourses.com and when you get to the checkout, put in 7 steps 50 and there's a very good chance you will get a 50% reduction in the course fee. Okay. Because you're a podcast listener and there's a reward for you. Make sure you leave them a review in in exchange for that reward. But it's live on there. And Transform your business presentations is the main course. There are also three short courses. One's called Presentation Flying Start, because, you know, that's really important. Get that presentation off to that great big, you know, engaging Flying Start. There's one called Win more sales Pitches which just focuses on that. And there is another short course which is all about being a confident presenter because lots of people come to me and say, oh, yeah, I'm always trying to avoid presenting, Trevor, or I never feel confident. And well, that short course will help you as well. So you can find all that there. All the courses, there's voiceover slides, video format, there's audio format, there are summary notes, there are checklists, there's PDF of the slides, everything you could want. So head over to online presentationcourses.com and I'll put that link in the show notes also to include the 7 steps 50 where you, if you go for Transform your business presentations, you will get 50% off. And if you join any of the courses, you will get membership, free membership for the standout business presenters club where we'll be doing group coaching and exclusive webinars and all that sort of stuff. Right, let's go over and say hello to David Connors and the Swarm and let's learn how we can leverage those relationships we've got in all sorts of context and turn them into great sales opportunities. So, David, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for your time today. Now, would you like to give the listeners a little bit of detail about yourself and what you're up to, please?

Sure. Thanks, Trevor. Great to be here. So my name's David. I'm the co founder, CEO of the Swarm. We are a goto network platform that allows companies to leverage the relationships that sit around their organization and to grow faster than they have before.

Well, well, now you say leverage their relationships. Now we, we all know that people buy from people. That's a phrase that we've used on this podcast many times. So give us a little bit of an indication, David, because I think your network is, your networking system is a bit more sophisticated than some might have. Some might, others might be.

That's right. It's, you know, I think bringing the human back into sales is this big trend that we're seeing. I think there's this movement against the mass outbound spray and pray techniques.

Oh God, thank goodness. Well, we all get tons of those. I mean, I can't believe the, the, I was going to say the quality. I think it's the inequality of those as well. They're all rubbish and terrible quantity.

Yeah, that's right. I think it just got so easy to one click and send out a thousand emails that all look the same. So then your email inbox is getting flooded, your LinkedIn inbox getting flooded. Maybe your, your phone and voicemail, you know, are getting inundated with all of these pitches, all of these sales pitches that are very undifferentiated and they're not personalized and it's just noise at the end of the day. So what cuts through the noise better than anything is trust and human relationships and knowing someone very well. And they come to you and they say, hey Trevor, I know you. We used to work together, for example, and you know, we used to grab beers on a Friday down at the pub. And now I'm at this new company, I think that, you know, we're doing something really interesting. Would you be interested in checking it out? We're working with a few of your, you know, peers in the industry. Say, sure man, yeah, happy to, happy to, you know, take time out of my day and learn a bit more. But if that exact same company just hit you up with one of these spammy messages, you'd send it right to the bin.

Wow. So, David, I think the best way to try and so listeners understand what this is about, just give us a, give us an example of how the swarm works. If a company come, you know, if someone's going to use your, your technology.

Yeah, sure. So we work with a lot of startups and these tech startups often have a big bench of advisors and investors. So this one series B startup, they had 150 advisors that they had on the bench that they could go to for advice about different things and to help them and One of the, the ideas was there's this big network that they have. It's all these networks, all these connections that these advisors and these investors have. But it had been really hard to actually see all of those connections, let alone leverage them in an efficient way. So that's what the swarm helps you to do. You have all of those 150 advisors, they connected their LinkedIn accounts, so pulled in all the LinkedIn contacts, as well as their email and calendar contacts, as well as all their previous work colleagues. And what the swarm system does is it applies this connection strength score to everyone in your network and it looks at those different inputs. So LinkedIn connection is pretty weak these days of a actual relationship. It's, you know, people have connected with thousands and thousands of people, but if I can see that you're connected on LinkedIn and maybe you also swapped emails and you also work together, then that's a much better chance that there's actually a relationship there. So we go through and do all that scoring. If it's all done automatically takes a few seconds. And then you have this database of all of the relationships of your company that you can then tap into. Um, so for that company, they wanted to find more customers, so then brought in their target account list, all these companies they're trying to go after. And then they looked at the hundred target accounts. They had about 40% of those, they had warm intro paths. So then using this, they could send out these intro requests, which was affordable. Email to that advisor. They say, can you pass this along to your contact at this target account? They then make the intro and it's a 5 to 10x better conversion to meetings than if they'd done cold outbound alone. And 3 to 5x higher win rates as well, because you have that trust already in the funnel and you can help push it through to close.

Wow. So one of the keys then is identifying the kind, well, the target companies that you want to work with and then your swarm network, if I've understood this correctly, David does all that kind of heavy lifting, if you like, they're searching out and provide you with that kind of, that kind of contact.

Yeah, exactly. So it's, you know, out of all of our potential customers who are our warmest. Right, because let's start there first. They're going to be the easiest to bring in. And then we'll go cold once we've exhausted all of the warm accounts.

Yeah, and does the, and how, how does the next step work then? Once, once that kind of, you know, once let's say I've, you know, I've gone through your system and, and I don't know, a dozen warm people have come up. What do I, what do I need to do next?

Yeah. So you're then doing all the heavy lifting for them. Right. So you're crafting this note that they can pass along to their contact. So you'd include, is a bit more about our company, maybe you know, kind of below the fold. You'd include about your company, the other customers that you work with, more about the value prop, how exciting it is. And they can then pass that along with, to the, to their contact ask, you know, are you interested in chatting with this salesperson, this, this founder, whoever it is. And then they say, yep, sure, introduce me. And off you go.

Wow. So there's, it is the, it is the genuine. It is the network chain that you might get on a, in an in person basis on a very small scale, but this is taking it to a larger scale on clearly on a global basis by the sounds of it.

That's right.

Yeah.

And it's, to date it's been really manual and ad hoc to kind of make these connections in people's brains. But like, oh, you should chat to Trevor who does this, you know, but what we're able to do is actually reveal all of that data and those relationships so that you as the salesperson can do that heavy lifting for your network versus just relying on people remembering at the right time in the right place.

Yeah. Wow. Wow. And when was there a seminal moment when yourself and whoever was involved at the beginning, David, side of thought, you know, realized that there was a gap here and that you, you got an idea and how did you, how did that come about?

Yeah, I was previously working at a venture capital firm called Sequoia Capital. They were a, they, they acquired my last startup. So I was then building some custom tools for them in house. And it was through that process I kind of learned how powerful these investors networks were for these portfolio companies. They went from these no name startups to suddenly backed by Sequoia and the access that they got this unfair advantage for talent, for customers, for other investors and it really set them off on a different trajectory. And obviously there's a lot of work that the investors did in sort of operationalizing their network and all these connections to companies, to people, to candidates, to other investors and some of the internal tools that we built help them to build this machine. So that was kind of the initial proof of concept. I had this aha. Kind of Light bulb moment. I was like, okay, this is possible. You know, why doesn't this exist for everyone to be able to leverage the network like this? We've got, we've all got LinkedIn, but it's, you know, it's more for individuals. It does a really bad job at harnessing the collective network of a company.

Yeah.

So that's what we set about to build with the Swarm.

And do you. When you. When people work with you, David, when they come and, you know, they. Because. Well, let's just check that out first. So how, you know, do organizations. Do they pay a fixed fee, a membership fee? How does it all work at your end?

Yeah, it's a SaaS subscription. So each month it's a flat fee, depending on how many seats you're using, and it starts at 29 bucks per month. So it's pretty accessible for almost anyone to be able to get started. And it has a lot of different functionality depending on kind of what you need. You can hook up your CRM if you've got a HubSpot or Salesforce. And we have our own big database of around 800 million profiles that we've put together that's comparable to ZoomInfo or Apollo IO.

And it feels like, you know, with all systems. You mentioned CRM there as well. I've worked with a lot of organizations about CRM systems and they, they get very excited when they first take these on, you know, and then of course, things drift and they. And they. They don't use them properly anymore. So how do you know? How do you. How do you make sure that your. Your clients, if you like, fully utilizing your system.

Oh, man, I could talk for hours about the pains of CRM. They're all a necessary evil. No one enjoys doing data entry into their CRM. I think we're seeing this emergence of this new generation of CRMs. We aren't positioning ourselves as a CRM yet, but I think we will in the coming years be entering into that space. The way you can think about it is the CRM is this empty shell that you then input your data into, but you have to do all this work to input all your data. You just. All you get is these empty fields that you then have to fill with data. And it's all of your known opportunities. These are all the things that's sort of like looking backwards kind of. These are the things that we know have happened. The next generation of these platforms will look to the future and say all the. Here's all the potential opportunities and have all of that data in there, so you don't have to do as much manual data entry, which I'm excited about. And I think a lot of salespeople I talked to are excited about not having to do as much data entry in a CRM. Definitely sounds like a better future to me.

Well, talking of better futures, I mean, you mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation about human relationships and the trust back in sales, you know, through that. And here we are, David, we're in an era where every, every day, you know, we hear the word AI mentioned and all this stuff that's going to be done for us. So from your perspective, how do you, how do you kind of see the future of sales? Because, you know, people are, you know, will, Will. Will human interactions actually be needed?

I definitely think so. The way I see it is that humans will be assisted by these AI agents. So when you think about it, sales is the classic funnel. From the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. There's maybe a thousand different micro activities that happen in that funnel. And Mike Garg at Craft Ventures has a great summary of this if he wants to look it up. But is this thing at the top of the funnel where you're ingesting lots of data and you're doing research and you're trying to look at signals and trends, that's a really great opportunity for some AI to help. As you start getting towards the bottom of the funnel, it's much more about human to human trust and knowing that there's someone who's accountable at the other side of the table, especially for larger know ACV deals. And I think that's going to be very unlikely that humans are going to trust an AI agent rather than having a human on the other side. So I think every human will have their own AI agents who are assisting and helping and doing all of the low value repetitive tasks, especially at the top of the funnel. I think that's much more disruptible. But as we get down into the bottom of the funnel, I think we're still going to see a lot of space for humans and it's going to be, I think, a more enjoyable profession for a lot of folks as well. As we said, don't have to do as much data entry, not as much web research and it's more just spending time talking and consulting with your customers, helping them to, you know, to educate them and to have that more collaborative relationship versus yeah, I think it's got a bit sort of transactional. The last sort of 10 to 15 years as people have just been trying to hit their quota and just trying to do whatever they can to, you know, almost trick people into taking meetings, adjusting subject lines and doing these breakup emails and all these different tricks to try and increase the conversion, you know. But I think we're moving away from that, thankfully.

Well, I think most of us prefer, I would imagine, although not everybody, but I think most of us in that kind of front end business relationship business, if you like, if that's the word for it. I mean, we do prefer the interaction bit rather than all the, all the stuff behind the scenes, you know. I mean, salespeople. Notorious, aren't they, for not being very good at the admin, like the CRM systems, you know, whereas being good at actually, you know, that human interaction bit. Yeah, that really, really, really quite. Yeah, very interesting indeed. So, so where does the swarm go from here, David? Are you continuing to evolve what you're offering?

Yeah, so we, you know, today you can think of us as this data platform that helps you to map and leverage all the relationships that your company can tap into. As we look to the future, I think we continue to build out how the, the relationships are used and as I mentioned before, probably starting to enter into a bit more of that CRM space. So you, rather than using Salesforce or HubSpot, you might have everything in this form instead. And obviously we'll be connecting to the other systems that you use. So not only helping you to manage and leverage your relationships, but all of your customers and all the other, you know, key relationships that you, that you.

Have as a firm and how important within those, especially those initial connections is going to be connecting not just, you know, rather than through the traditional written format necessarily, but through like we're doing now, either in an audio or a video format. Because I imagine that if you get, you know, you can see someone, talk to them or listen to them even, you get more of a feel for them as a person. And that must help that human relationship, doesn't it?

Absolutely, yeah. And there's no replacement as well for in person. Right. The IRL relationships and the offline, you know, relationships. So that's all part of the, the vision of what we're building as well, that we want to combine the online and the offline connections, have this single source of truth for all of your relationships. So we're very early in that journey. But that's the, that's the ambition.

Well, it's very exciting, very exciting. Now, listeners to this podcast, it's called Better Presentations, more Sales, as you know. So, so clearly I'm thinking here the, you know, the better presentations part, not necessarily standing up and delivering a slide, a slide deck, but actually the way you present yourself. This has got to be helpful for that. I'm thinking definitely.

Yeah. And I think also the channel that you're presenting yourself is really moving away from this cold, outbound spray and pray mentality and more into this. How can I lean on my network? How can I really leverage all the supporters that our company has and being able to start with the warm before you go cold.

Now, David, I always ask my guests if they've got a couple of tips that listeners might put into action straight away. Not, you know, not necessarily by signing up for one of your subscriptions, but hopefully they will. But before I do that, how do people find out more about you and the Swarm and how would you like them to make contact with you if they want to?

Yeah, best place is on LinkedIn. I post there regularly with some of my latest musings and things that we're learning. And the Swarm page on there as well. And there's a, on the Swarm.com we have more content and videos as well if people want to check it out.

So that's the swarm dot com. Right. I'll put, though, I'll put a link to the LinkedIn and to the website in the show notes as well so people can, can find that. So if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, yeah, yeah, I get all this, I need to stop sending those ridiculously, you know, ineffective emails and do something better. What would be the, what would be the things you, a couple of things you might advise them to get on and do immediately, David?

Yeah, I think the number one thing to start is just to understand the relationships that you have. So you have to map your connections before you can do anything else. Now, there's different ways to do that. You can, you know, look through LinkedIn, you can look through email calendar, contacts, you can push that all onto a spreadsheet, you know, and then search across it. Obviously we offer an interface to do that pretty easily and would definitely recommend just starting there is to map your relationships. And then I think the second thing is that understanding the importance of human relationships over the next five to 10 years is going to become more and more critical and important. So start today with not only nurturing your existing network, but taking time out of your, your week, maybe carving out an hour or two every week to try and to foster those new connections and to help out New people in your network and you know, if you block it off in your calendar, try to do, you know, an hour or two a week, I think you'll see some really nice compound, compounding effects, you know, even within a month or two.

And would you, would you also. Going back to tip number one, David, about understanding and mapping out the relationships you have now, would you also include that. What you might, what I might call non current business relationships, but people that, you know because you, you know, you're part of a club or an, or a community or something like that and there's, there's you never. I mean, I've, I've worked with a lot of people over the years where the conversation has started because I've gone running with them or something, you know.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, those are, those are great. You know, they're all part of your network where they use to work together or if you're in a community together, you have some joint interests, you know, it's all part of your personal network that you can be tapping into whether now or in the future.

So just for clarification on that, listeners we're talking about, when we're talking about your personal network, it is basically everybody, you know, regardless of in what context.

Yep, that's right.

Fantastic, Fantastic. Well, David, it's been fantastic to have you on the show and to really open our eyes to how we might go forward and leverage those networks. And it's great to hear that the human relationship has still got a long way to go in the sales environment.

Thanks, Trevor. Appreciate the time.

Great stuff, David. Well, we'll maybe get you back on in the future and see how things are going.

Sounds like a plan.

Great stuff. Thanks so much, David.

Bye. Bye.

Well, there we go. Thanks very much to David for coming on. And I put all David's contact details in the show notes along with, you know, the two top tips that he gave and Great. You know that it's all about human relationships, isn't it? We're not gonna be sold to by AI all the time in the future. Okay. So you're still important as a human being, but probably more important than ever in your relationship with your customers and that sort of thing. So that's all fantastic stuff. So if you like the show, don't forget, please leave a review. That would be amazing. Please do share it, talk about it. That would be fantastic as well. Now, you may want to be a guest on this show as well, because I get inundated with people who want to be guests but a lot of them are just not the right fit for the show. And a lot of them, you know, are agents who've got podcasters coming out their ears, and they they just rock up to the show and all that sort of stuff. So I'm keen to maybe have people on this show who've never been on a podcast before as a guest. If you've got something to share and you are, well, it's clearly got to be around the presentation sales pitch area, then drop me a line, podcastrevellymedia.co.uk or connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message. And then let's talk about you being a future guest on this podcast. Podcast. How about that? It could be your podcasting debut, and I'll guide you through it and make it easy for you to do. Right. Thanks for listening. Thanks very much for listening. See you next time.