In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Drew Sechrist, CEO and co-founder of Connect the Dots and longtime Salesforce veteran, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to unpack what it really means to build a relationship intelligence layer that changes how your team goes to market.

Drew shares why his own career win stories at Salesforce led him to build Connect the Dots, and how mapping real relationship strength can turn stalled enterprise deals into closed revenue. He breaks down the nuance of activating networks at scale, aligning incentives around introductions, and embedding relationship data directly into the existing workflow so new processes do not die on the vine. From Monday pipeline reviews to executive access and stuck late stage opportunities, Drew explains how the best revenue teams treat relationship intelligence like the air they breathe.

What You’ll Learn:

• Relationship Intelligence Fundamentals: What it really means to build a relationship intelligence layer and why it is a different go to market motion than cold outbound.
• Incentives and Activation: Why simply seeing who knows whom is only half the game and how incentive alignment, compensation, and context determine whether relationships actually get activated.
• Workflow, Not Side Quest: Practical ways to embed relationship data in tools like Salesforce, Slack, and email so managers naturally coach around it in pipeline reviews.
• From Story to Playbook: How one trusted introduction at Salesforce unlocked a seven figure deal and how that kind of magic can be turned into a repeatable team playbook.
• Modern Deal Strategy: How to use relationship maps and heat maps to unblock late stage deals stuck with finance, legal, or executive signoff instead of just hoping the contract gets approved.

Key Topics:

• Building a relationship intelligence layer for GTM and revenue teams
• The nuance of relationship activation and incentive alignment
• Where relationship intelligence should live in the RevOps and sales tech stack
• Using Salesforce embedded views, alerts, and APIs instead of forcing new UI and heavy change management
• Designing Monday pipeline reviews that start with “who do we know” and “have we connected the dots”
• Why LinkedIn connections alone are noisy and how signal based relationship scoring changes the game
• Moving from manual “who knows who” exercises to scalable, AI powered relationship mapping

Guest Spotlight: Drew Sechrist

Drew Sechrist is the CEO and co founder of Connect the Dots and a former Salesforce executive who rose through the ranks during the company’s hyper growth era. His experience closing large, relationship driven enterprise deals at Salesforce inspired him to build a platform that operationalizes the power of real networks for modern revenue teams. Today, Drew helps companies turn hidden relationship capital into measurable improvements in win rates, cycle times, and deal size.

Resources and Mentions:

• Company: Connect the Dots
• Concept: Relationship intelligence and relationship heat maps for GTM
• Book: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Platform Ecosystem: Salesforce, Slack, email, and RevOps systems as primary surfaces for relationship data

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