Discover how relationship mapping unlocks organic business development
To say prospects are overwhelmed by the volume of cold outreach they receive is an understatement. Sales reps send an average of 36 emails each day, not to mention phone calls, social messages, and other touchpoints. It’s a lot of time, effort, and energy with increasingly little ROI, especially when you consider that 74% of business buyers conduct most of their research online before making a purchase. In this landscape, prospects have often already formed a shortlist of potential options before your team has even identified them as an opportunity.
To make a real impact, you can’t rely on cold outreach to move the needle, let alone get noticed. You need an entry point to cut through the noise, one built on warm introductions from people your prospects already know and trust. But how do you uncover connections and introduction opportunities to begin with, particularly at the scale needed to generate real revenue? That’s where relationship mapping comes in.
Why relationship mapping is the new standard for business development initiatives
Traditional prospecting techniques are excellent for identifying target accounts, understanding their influence, and uncovering their motivations, but this information can only take you far with cold outreach. Relationship mapping goes further by utilizing this information to reveal the pathways your organization has to reach these them.
Relationship mapping expands on the idea of org charts and visually showcase the first and second degree connections to stakeholders in your network that could feasibly make an introduction. What’s more, they reveal the informal power structures present within an org chart, including who are most influential, who might be your allies, and champion.
This clarity comes with incredible benefits. Research shows that buyers are 5 times more likely to engage with a sales rep when approached via a warm introduction rather than cold outreach. And this one stat highlights the immense payoff of leveraging relationship mapping for business development:
- Accelerated Deal Sourcing
In addition to showing a pathway to target prospects, relationship mapping transforms your existing network from a passive Rolodex into an active prospecting engine. Instead of starting from scratch, you can systematically mine the connections of your colleagues, executives, investors, and satisfied customers to reveal a hidden pipeline of opportunities that are already connected to your organization, dramatically speeding up the initial stages of filling the funnel.
- De-Anonymized Buying Committees
The average B2B purchasing process involves 6 to 10 decision-makers. Relationship mapping allows you to identify every key player in a target account, so you understand the complete landscape of who matters and how they relate to one another as you strategize closing the deal.
- Dramatically Increased Engagement
Cold emails go increasingly unopened, and cold calls feel increasingly invasive. Relationship mapping overcomes these barriers with warm introductions so you can not only actually begin conversations but start off on friendlier footing.
- Hyper-Personalized Outreach
Relationship mapping provides rich context beyond a prospect’s name and title, revealing shared professional histories, alumni networks, board affiliations, philanthropic interests, and more. This intelligence allows you to tailor messages with powerful personalization, immediately moving a conversation beyond a generic sales pitch to an actual dialogue.
- Shorter Sales Cycles & Higher Win Rates
Warm introductions bypass the most time-consuming part of the sales process: building initial trust. By entering the conversation with a referral, you start from a position of credibility, allowing you to advance to substantive discussions faster. This acceleration, combined with a deeper understanding of the buying committee’s dynamics, directly translates into shorter sales cycles and a higher probability of winning deals.
How to do effective relationship mapping
Drawing a relationship map requires a lot of data and organization, but it’s well worth the effort. Here’s the step-by-step process to create it:
- Identify & Prioritize Target Accounts
Begin by using firmographic and intent data to create a focused list of high-value target accounts.
- Understand the Buying Committee
For each account, identify the 6-10 key players in the decision-making unit (DMU). This is typically where manual research hits a wall, as public information is often incomplete or outdated.
- Map the Connections and Influence
Chart both the formal reporting lines and the informal relationships between stakeholders. Keep in mind:- Who has worked together before?
- Who sits on a board together?
- What is the quality and level of influence of each of these relationships?
- Who are your potential champions that can advocate for you internally?
- Who are the potential blockers you need to navigate around?
- Discover Connection Pathways
Overlay your entire organization’s network (including executives, board members, investors, and even satisfied customers) onto the target’s DMU to find mutual connections.
- Execute Strategic Outreach
Rank introduction pathways based on the strength and credibility of the mutual connection. Arm your introducer with a low-friction, clear request that makes it easy for them to help. Remember to use the intelligence from your map to personalize your messaging.
- Measure, Refine, and Repeat
Track key metrics like meeting acceptance rates from warm intros versus cold outreach. Treat your relationship maps as living documents that you continuously update as people move and relationships evolve.
Data: the secret ingredient to high value relationship mapping
A relationship map is only as good as the data that fuels it. Think about how much information you need to know not only about target prospects, but the organizations they work in, not to mention your own network connected to them:
- Firmographic & Organizational Data
The foundational layer that includes their company and its organizational chart, departments, and reporting structures.
- Professional Relationship & Affinity Data
Details about the connections between people in the map, such as their shared employment history, memberships, business and investment ventures, alumni networks and more.
- Role Intelligence & Personal Interests
The deepest layers of data that beyond job titles into insights about stakeholder’s areas of responsibility, specific projects they’ve been involved in, extracurricular hobbies, philanthropic causes, and more.
Without this high-quality, accurate information, your mapping efforts will be neither effective nor sustainable, costing you more in the long run than wasted time on cold outreach. In fact, IBM estimates that poor-quality data costs businesses $3.1 trillion per year in the US alone. For business development teams, bad data translates directly into wasted time chasing departed executives, messaging that misses the mark, and tarnished trust with members of your network that you’re requesting inaccurate introductions from.
Unfortunately, in today’s fast-paced business world, this type of data decays rapidly. Professionals move jobs every few years or more, dramatically shifting company culture with each move, and personal interests can be impossible to track over so many social media platforms. Manually building this type of people intelligence database can require more manpower than most organizations have on hand and keeping all of this information accurate and up-to-date can be even more challenging. Reliable relationship mapping requires a strategic people intelligence partner.
Connect to the right people faster with Altrata’s relationship mapping
Altrata provides the world’s most powerful executive intelligence platform, designed to help organizations of all sizes and industries supercharge business development efforts. Altrata provides:
- Accurate, Best-In-Class Global Data
Our proprietary database provides the verified, up-to-date intelligence on executives and companies required that fuels relationship mapping.
- Visual Relationship Pathways
Our platform automatically visualizes complex relationship networks, uncovering hidden connections you could never find through conventional research and manual mapping methods. Recently, one global management consulting firm used Altrata to identify a new well of qualified prospects within their network and dramatically accelerate deal velocity, moving from insight to opportunity in record time.
- APIs & Integrations
Our data feeds directly into your existing workflows to ensure relationship intelligence is accessible to your entire business development team, not trapped in a static spreadsheet.
Ready to stop chasing cold leads and start making warm connections? Schedule a demo of Altrata, today.