Enhancing Sales Velocity with Relationship Intelligence: Smallworld CEO David Rush Shares Insights

Hello and welcome to Growing Tech Fast, the All 3D podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by David Rush. So David is a CEO and founder of Small World. Now Small World help companies leverage the power of relationships to drive and increase revenue for better business results.

David, welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining me. Thank you, Adam. Great to be here and I look forward to the conversation. Great.

Well, to kick us off, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself and Small World and what you're passionate about as well when it comes to the tech world? Yeah. So, you know, my background, I've been in commercial leadership roles most of my career. I've led sales teams, marketing teams, and sort of have seen what works and what doesn't work in terms of pipeline development, conversion rates, all the different sales velocity metrics.

And so the inspiration for Small World really came from empathy for both the people that are trying to get warm introductions into target accounts and then those connectors who are being enlisted to make those introductions. And so as I started to really look at what worked and what didn't work for the very best salespeople, it was clear they were very good at identifying points of connectivity, either relationships within their network or elsewhere, to get access to senior level people.

But it was always a process that started in LinkedIn that involved spreadsheets and a lot of sort of messaging. So the inspiration for Small World was really to operationalize that at scale so that teams could leverage this really important asset, which is relationships and trust at scale throughout their entire company. Sure. Okay.

And so if you remember, I actually invited you on the podcast on the back of a LinkedIn post that I saw you put out there. And you were talking about the inefficiency of SDR teams versus partners, network-led growth. and the comments are really blowing up, which always makes for great content. But just talk me through in that post, what was the point you were trying to make?

I don't believe you were saying, right, companies should eradicate SDR teams. But yeah, what was the point you're trying to make and the message you're trying to get across there? Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great point. Absolutely, it wasn't a suggestion the team should eliminate those teams.

But companies are now looking for more efficient ways to grow. Boards are asking for profitability alongside growth. And so to do that, oftentimes it does require some consideration of how to reduce costs. And so when you look at customer acquisition costs and the investment made in these teams, there's typically about an 18-month payback period.

These SDRs or BDRs typically will either get promoted if they're really good, But sometimes they'll leave or be asked to leave if they're not. So there's a high attrition rate, good or bad. And so when you start to look at really what you're seeking to accomplish for top of funnel, I think it requires more inspection than it used to, right? Cold outreach has totally changed.

And so throwing more bodies at the problem is not proving to be a wise decision. And so the argument that I was making in my post was if there was a smarter way to identify new ways to find opportunities through the power of trust and actually more senior level people and get those meetings sooner, wouldn't that be a smart way to complement the importance of SDRs and BDRs who really become more of a cadence marketing resource right So what they doing is communicating the value proposition the messaging and keeping your brand top of mind so that when the right time comes to make a decision they think about you as a partner buyers do What what relationship growth or network-led growth powered by a tool like Small World does is it capitalizes on getting access to senior level people right now.

They may not even know they have a problem, right? So So timing for them may not be as obvious, but once they discover the value of a particular solution, that timing changes. So that was the whole idea behind it. It can enable companies to not only achieve better sales velocity metrics, but it can help them reduce the cost of investing in big SDR teams.

You mentioned at the start of that that cold outreach has changed. um so so what is it about the the timing today um how has cold in your opinion how has cold outreach changed over the last year or last few years even um so so what is it about about the timing of that and why this route to go to market is is is so important today would you say yeah i mean there's been a couple of things one you know new regulation uh you know with google and Yahoo in terms of just sheer volume that can be sent.

That clearly was a signal from a spam perspective that is real. I think the second is what's happening with AI, right? It's a good thing to some degree, but I think smart targets, target prospects are able to read through that pretty quickly. And it actually becomes an impediment in many ways because as AI becomes more evolved, that outreach becomes less authentic, right?

And so people don't want to respond to inauthentic messaging. So I think those are a couple of things related to cold outreach. But the other thing that's happening in the industry, and I was at the Forrester Summit a couple of weeks ago, is every company is analyzing their win-loss rates and their conversion rates and what's different about the deals they win versus the deals that they lose. And the one big determinant is how many relationships or connections they have within an active opportunity versus the ones that they lose.

So, you know, one customer of ours shared with us all their wins had seven or more relationships in those wins. All the losses had four or less. And so what companies are looking to do is appeal to a larger buying committee. They're looking to multi-threat across an organization.

They want to get access into, you know, the C-suite as much as they do sort of the end users. And it's a true collective decision that's being made now. So as teams start to think about, you know, multi-threading and appealing to a larger group within their prospect, the importance of relationship becomes even greater, right? Because through those existing relationships, instant access can be granted and expansion of coverage within that account can increase immediately.

Okay. And so is, is network led growth, um, is this something that, um, all B2B companies can use, would you say? Is this more applicable to enterprise? What's your thoughts there?

Yeah, I mean, any B2B company, we have seed stage companies all the way up to traded companies using our platform today. I think, you know, the common denominator is they do believe in this approach. They're, you know, oftentimes incentivizing or investing in new ways to leverage those existing networks. And they really want to operationalize the process because what's happening today is, you know, if reps are using LinkedIn, connections are a terrible proxy for relationship strength, you know, whether it's 75% or 80% of connections are not real relationships.

And so there's a lot of, you know, hit and miss. There's not a great way to sort of, you know track and manage and then really look you know universally across a business to find all of the relationships And so again companies that have done this traditionally through a spreadsheet in LinkedIn are rethinking sort of the approach that they're taking. And this can appeal to technology companies, business services, consulting, really any business that is looking to leverage warm introductions and referrals more effectively.

Okay. Just for my benefit then, how does the small world platform work? because in my head as we're talking, all I'm thinking about is LinkedIn and thinking, well, I've got my LinkedIn connection, my network there. You're right.

There's probably 10,000 people there, of which I've spoken to 20% of them properly. So, yeah, how does your platform work and how does that differ from LinkedIn? Yeah. So part of the inspiration for this, you know, was to be able to identify where a real relationship was.

So if you really knew someone and you had a trusted relationship, their willingness to meet just based on blind trust was super powerful. And so we built a system that makes it really easy for those people who are called connectors in our system. And these can be executives, investors, customers, partners, anyone within the ecosystem of a business. But those people can signal where they have a real relationship and where they don't.

And what happens is where they do have a real relationship, those become relationship leads for the sales team. So rather than those salespeople having to go search to find that, they're actually delivered, you know, hand delivered in their inbox or in Salesforce, these relationship leads, which have an incredibly high conversion rate. they may not need an introduction at that moment, but they can also save these relationship leads to their deal teams. So as you start to think about account planning and who should be on that deal team, because of the strength of the relationship coming directly from the connector, the willingness for them to help and be a part of it goes way up.

And so we remove all the ambiguity of having these requests come unexpectedly to connectors. They're really in control over signaling the strength of that relationship. But from a data perspective, we pull in LinkedIn data, of course, Gmail contacts, any personal CRM data. And we've actually got our own relationship intelligence.

We call it relationship AI, which will go out and look at things like work history, recommendations, different clues that we can pull that would basically discern that there is likely a relationship here. We won't present someone who we don't think there's the likelihood of a relationship. We don't know the strength of that relationship, so we'll never presume to know that, but we will present it as a relationship, even if it's not on LinkedIn, right? And so in those cases, we're actually discovering relationships that otherwise wouldn't be seen by the salesperson and making it additive to what they would see on LinkedIn.

Okay, interesting. Okay. So tell me what, can you give me or walk me through maybe a customer of yours, whether you name them or not, up to you, but who has adopted this really well? What are the results they see?

How did that look pre-small world? How does it look for them post-small world? Yeah, for sure. There's a couple that come to mind.

I'll give one example. I can't name the name of the customer on the podcast, but it's a publicly traded major technology company who has their executive team and other leaders within the company as their sort of connector base. And they've got some partners in there as well. And they've got their strategic accounts team using our product and then other AEs.

And the big benefit that the salespeople tell us is we've removed this mystery of which connectors to enlist. And we've made it very comfortable for them to request introductions through Small World because they're able to get that relationship strength signal. And then through the workflow that we built we make that simpler both for the connector but also for the salesperson to make those requests And so what this particular rep told us is we were responsible for three particular deals that he had closed one which was a seven figure deal, the other one, which was a high six figure deal.

And I don't know the size of the third one, but over $2 million worth of business was attributed to C-suite introductions that he got starting in small world, which is exciting to hear. And I think for me, the inspiration to build this business was because we could show business outcomes. It wasn't going to be just another productivity tool or just another layer of intelligence. It was going to be a solution for the last mile, which was that reps really want is access.

They've got all the data in the world, right? They could say, oh, they went to the same college together and they both love basketball and they both live in you know san antonio none of that matters if trust isn't there right and so trust unlocks that access and and it's authentic because it's you know only been built over time where some of this like well it looks like you went to you know usc doesn't feel authentic all the time right it feels forced and so what we're doing is trying to really reveal something that doesn't have to be forced.

Like that's, that's really good. So I guess, um, just, just to kind of conclude and summarize what I'd love is, um, what, what kind of piece of, of actionable advice, uh, could you offer to, to salespeople, be it SDRs, be it, um, senior ICs, leaders, um, who probably aren't leveraging networks as effectively as they could be. What, what would you suggest? A couple of things that aren't as obvious to those that already do this that may be interesting is that you oftentimes can get access to the people that you're trying to access indirectly through a strong relationship.

So in other words, let's say you're selling into the engineering department and you know that meeting with a VP of engineering or the chief technology officer is really who you want to meet with. And there's no clear path there. And your ABM team is you know, creating content for them and there's outreach. Little did you know that maybe your chief marketing officer, she may have a very strong relationship with their chief marketing officer who happens to be on Slack with the VP of engineering and is in meetings with them twice a week.

And all that needs to happen is that CMO to reach out to that close friend of hers, have that person that they know really well, send a quick Slack to the VP of engineering and the meeting happens, right? So these indirect paths often create access that many people don't often think about. And the universe of relationships that's available to you isn't just your own network. So reps will start with their own network naturally, and they should.

But the company's network, you've got people who are intrinsically motivated, whether it's an investor, whether it's a board member, whether it's whoever it might be, they're intrinsically motivated. And then we're also seeing companies now create tangible incentives for employees to make these introductions. So they act as sort of this, you know, team of BDRs, but they're already, you know, maybe in the product, you know, organization, or they're in the engineering department, and they used to work with somebody.

So the universe of relationships that you have access to is much larger than you might think. That would be the other piece of advice I'd give them. I like it. Thank you so much for that.

It's been a really insightful conversation. So thank you for joining us today on the podcast. And I'm sure if anyone out there is interested or has any questions for you, they can just hit you up on LinkedIn. I know you're pretty active on there.

And I'm sure you'd be happy to talk, right? Absolutely. Yeah, our website is smallworld.ai.

And feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. And my email address is david at smallworld.ai. So appreciate any inquiries.

Great. Thanks so much, David. Appreciate it, Adam. All right.

Thanks.