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July 25, 2025
Olivier Roth

Unlocking Your Most Valuable Growth Channel: How to Build a Go-to-Network Motion

What if I told you the most valuable growth channel in your business is sitting right under your nose—and you’re barely using it?

I’m talking about your network. Not just yours personally, but your team’s, your investors’, your advisors’, your most loyal customers’.

People who already trust you. People who want you to win. People who know the decision-makers you’re trying to reach.

At The Swarm, we built our business around this idea. And today, nearly 30% of our pipeline comes from warm intros powered by our Go-to-Network motion.

That’s not a channel. That’s a moat.

💡 The Highest-Utility, Most Underutilized Asset in Business

Every company is sitting on a list of connectors: early backers, friends of the brand, internal champions, industry allies.

Let's take ourselves as an example. We're a startup and we're living this. We’ve got about 400 of them.

But even before The Swarm had the tooling to map their networks, most of that potential was going to waste.

Why? Because the networks weren’t visible. LinkedIn is noisy, too binary, and hard to action. Manual intro hunting is too slow because you're swimming in binary connected/non-connected data.

But once you start activate your connectors relationships systematically?

This is what it looks from our 400 connectors.

  • We discovered 736,000 mapped relationships
  • We drove warm intros into hard-to-reach accounts
  • And we slashed CAC while increasing close rates

This is not a silver bullet. But it’s close!

🧱 What Makes This So Powerful?

Let’s zoom out:

  • It's first-party data: You’re not buying leads. You’re unlocking relationships no one else has access to.
  • Non-replicable: No one can just copy your network. It’s uniquely yours.
  • Low cost, high impact: No media spend. Just process, tooling, and consistency.
  • Compounding: One intro leads to a closed deal… which leads to a new connector… which leads to more intros.

This is the kind of thing that becomes structural advantage over time. Especially if you build a motion around it.

🔁 How to Build Your Go-to-Network Motion

1. List your connectors

Start with:

  • Cap table (investors, syndicates)
  • Advisors and mentors
  • Most engaged customers
  • Friends of the company (past teammates, fellow founders, industry peers)

If you’re using tools like Attio, sort by relationship strength or recency of contact.

2. Ask for network access

No, not full email permissions—just permission to map mutual connections. Most people are happy to help. They just don’t have a system for it.

3. Map and enrich

This is where The Swarm comes in.

We aggregate relationship signals from:

  • Work overlaps
  • Education overlaps
  • Shared investors
  • LinkedIn connections
  • Calendar and email contacts (if available)

Suddenly, your connector list isn’t 400 names—it’s visibility into hundreds of thousands of possible warm paths.

4. Activate with intent

Each month:

  • Filter by your current sales targets
  • Identify the best path into each
  • Send 10–20 personalized intro requests to your connectors
  • Make it copy-paste easy

“Hey [First Name], would you be open to connecting me with [Target Name, Title, Company]? I can send over a short forwardable blurb.”

5. Track, optimize, repeat

You’ll get:

  • Better meetings
  • Shorter sales cycles
  • Lower churn
  • A growing network of allies

👤 Who Is This For?

If you're:

  • B2B
  • Sales-led or hybrid motion
  • Selling into mid-market or enterprise
  • This will work for you.

If you’re 100% PLG? Probably not worth the lift.

🚨 Don’t Let the Tooling Be the Excuse

You need a process, not just a product.

It works best when someone on your team owns it. Could be a RevOps junior, a growth hire, or even a founder at the early stage.

The key is: do the work.
The return is there—measurable, repeatable, and increasingly defensible.

TL;DR

  • You already have access to one of the most powerful growth engines in business: your extended network.
  • LinkedIn alone won’t unlock it. It's built for quantity, not quality of relationships.
  • A Go-to-Network motion can drive 25–30% of your pipeline with lower CAC and higher retention.
  • It’s the most underutilized yet most defensible growth lever you can invest in today.

We built The Swarm to make this motion easier. If you’re ready to turn your relationships into revenue, we’d love to help!