WTF is GTN? (Go-To-Network)
and why you should care • The Swarm x The Signal
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Hey y’all!
I’m really excited about today’s post.
I’ve known David Connors for almost a decade (wow). We met in San Francisco when we were working on previous companies (before his first exit). I’ve been following his journey at The Swarm very closely. And I was a customer when I was running Groundswell. I’ve always been super curious about “Warm Intros” and how to best leverage them across the entire go-to-market motion.
So, last month, when I asked David for feedback on an experiment I wanted to try — Deep Dive Sponsored posts on The Signal — I was excited when he said “I like the idea. I’ll do one with you!”
So, here we are!
Here’s what we cover in today’s post:
The broken playbook
The stages of operationalizing “go-to-network”
Innovating to remove friction
Selling picks & shovels - embedding in RevTech tools
The future of network-driven sales
PS - On Thursday (Nov 14th!), I’m joining David Connors (Co-founder & CEO at The Swarm), alongside Tido Carriero (Co-founder & CEO at Koala), Michael Heiberg (Co-founder & CEO at Ocean.io), and Yuriy Zaremba (Co-founder & CEO at AiSDR) for a webinar about the future of sales data.
Alright, let’s get into it!
WTF is "Go-To-Network"?
The broken playbook
It’s clear the old playbook in B2B is broken.
“Growth at all cost” days are behind us.
And companies are looking for more efficient (and scalable) ways to attract + acquire + convert + retain customers.
But, hidden within every company's network lies a web of warm relationships waiting to be discovered.
Warm intros have always made intuitive sense to me, to leverage in go-to-market. But, hard to crack. Hard to operationalize. There’s so much friction. (I know this, because, as a founder, I’ve tried many tools in the “warm intro”/”go-to-network” space).
With that said, warm intros (at scale) feel inevitable.
(That’s why I included them on my list of predictions I put out at the end of last year, check out number six: The New Playbook for Pipeline Generation is Emerging (14 predictions for 2024)).
And, in an era where AI is increasing the amount of noise, genuine warm introductions are becoming even more valuable. Imho, The Swarm’s solution is uniquely positioned to thrive in this environment.
The stages of operationalizing “go-to-network”
Another year in B2B SaaS, another acronym to learn. This one: GTN (go-to-network). Tldr: using your network throughout your customer buyer journey.
There are three stages that I’ve seen go-to-network (or, warm intros) get adopted within an organization. “Crawl, walk, run,” if you will.
V1—Beginner Mode: create a database.
The simplest way of operationalizing warm intros is to use a spreadsheet to get all of your employees and investors and other folks in your network into - so you can start getting warm intros into your target accounts/late-stage deals.
V2—Intermediate Mode: expand with advisor network.
The next layer down is to bring on advisors who are strategic to your business. Meaning, you go out and find advisors that can open up their networks for you. So instead of getting three to five advisors that you give a lot of equity to, instead, you get 30 to 50 advisors and you give a little bit of equity to each.
I highly recommend checking out Scott Leese’s Go-To-Network Playbook, for a full deep dive on how to run this playbook.
V3—Advanced Mode: AI mapping of complete company network.
The third layer down is where I think David and The Swarm are doing two unqiue things.
One, they aren't actually requiring users to take any action (download a Chrome extension and connect it to Gmail and or LinkedIn, etc.) They're removing the friction altogether. We’ll come back to this in a bit.
And, two, their distribution mechanism - partnering with other RevTech companies. So you might have something like Clay or Koala that actually has this data natively built into their workflows, so that as a rep is building out their book of business or prioritizing their accounts, they would actually be able to see if there is a strong, warm intro path into a certain account and what that intro path is, meaning is it an employee, one of the founders, an advisor or investor that can intro them into the account that they're trying to break into or that they're trying to sell into or that they're trying to expand or renew. This is magic.
Innovating to remove friction
As a user of these products for many years now, I’ve always struggled as a user, and to get my investors and advisors to participate.
The Swarm has taken a different approach. Instead of requiring active user participation, The Swarm has quietly built a database of over 600 million profiles, tracking 2-3 million job changes monthly. But what makes their approach unique isn't just the data collection – it's how they analyze it.
When a company wants to map their network, they simply provide their domain name. The Swarm then:
Identifies all current employees
Maps their previous work colleagues across all past companies
Analyzes educational overlaps and shared investor networks
Scores relationships based on factors like overlap duration, company size, location, and function
The result? A sophisticated relationship graph that reveals warm introduction paths that would otherwise remain hidden.
Selling picks & shovels — embedding inside RevTech tools
I love thinking about unique go-to-market models. Completely new stuff. Where there isn’t a set “playbook.” So, when David described to me how they’ve been going to market recently, I had a lightbulb moment.
Instead of competing directly with existing sales tools, The Swarm has positioned itself as the relationship intelligence layer powering the entire RevTech ecosystem.
They're partnering with companies like Clay, Apollo, Common Room, Pocus, Warmly, and Koala – providing both raw data to improve these platforms and network mapping capabilities for their customers.
This approach solves two critical problems:
It removes friction by surfacing relationship data directly within the tools sales teams already use.
It provides immediate distribution through established platforms with existing customer bases.
Whenever there’s a gold rush, it’s best to sell picks and shovels. As the RevTech space continues to boom, The Swarm is there to help all of the companies in this space.
Learning from years of iteration
There are a handful of really smart teams that I’ve talked to who are going after the “go-to-network” (warm intro) space. But, there hasn’t been a break-out company, yet. I think this is in part because of what I talked about above - friction to get people (introducers) to sign up for a standalone app, and friction to get end-users (salespeople) to adopt a new workflow.
David and their team have continued to learn at each stage of the journey. For instance, David told me that they realized at about 100 employees, traditional network mapping tools break down. And it’s almost impossible to get 1,000+ people to all sign up for a brand new platform and download a Chrome extension.
This realization led to a fundamental pivot in how The Swarm approaches the challenge of mapping professional networks.
Over the last three years, The Swarm has tested various approaches to network mapping.
So, they’ve built a fully passive, background network mapper that doesn’t rely on LinkedIn connections or users taking active steps. Instead, The Swarm has developed an API that can be queried and integrated directly into sales tools. This seamless, behind-the-scenes data gathering creates what David calls a “passive background network map,” almost entirely eliminating the friction that hindered earlier versions.
The future of network-driven sales
As AI increases the noise in sales channels, the importance of relationship-based selling is only growing. But The Swarm's vision extends beyond just mapping networks – they're imagining a future where relationship capital becomes a formalized, measurable asset. Wild idea.
Some companies are running the playbook to bring on paid advisors specifically for their networks. In several cases, these early, well-connected advisors can scale a company from zero to $5 million in revenue just through their network.
This trend suggests a future where relationship capital might be more explicitly valued and traded, with advisors potentially earning revenue shares or per-introduction fees for leveraging their networks.
The implications are fascinating. Imagine hiring salespeople based on a quantitative analysis of their relevant network connections, or building a marketplace for relationship capital where companies can find and compensate the perfect network-holders for their target market.
In a world drowning in noise (and, I believe, AI will only further this trend), The Swarm is betting that the future of B2B go-to-market will be powered by sophisticated network intelligence. And they're building the infrastructure to make that future possible.
Want to learn more?
If you want to talk with David, the Co-founder & CEO of The Swarm, shoot me a message and I can connect you directly.
Thank you for your continued trust and attention — I do not take it lightly.
PS - I’ve got a spicy piece dropping on Thursday, about The Rise of the GTM Engineer. You don’t want to miss it. 👀
See you Thursday,
Brendan 🫡