Scenario · For the Rep + their daily grind

What relationships do we have
at this target account?
Connections ≠ relationships.

It's Monday. You're prepping outreach for the 80 target accounts on your patch. You open Sales Nav. TeamLink shows mutual LinkedIn connections in your team. Customers aren't in TeamLink. Partners aren't. Advisors aren't. And just because someone is connected on LinkedIn doesn't mean they actually know that person. So you Slack five colleagues. Nothing happens. You move on.

Role: AE / SDR daily workflow · Trigger: Account research before outreach · Frequency: Every Monday, every account

The scenario, in real life.

Monday 9 AM. The AE has 80 target accounts on her patch this quarter. She's prepping prospecting blocks for the week. She opens Salesforce, lists her top 10 accounts for warm-path research, and opens Sales Nav side-by-side.

Account 1: BigCo. She filters BigCo by buying-committee titles. Six relevant contacts. She opens TeamLink. Result: "0 mutual connections from your team." She pings the #revenue Slack channel: "anyone know anyone at BigCo?" One person replies: "I think my brother went to school with their CFO?" The AE doesn't follow up. She moves on.

Account 2: HealthCo. Same drill. TeamLink shows 2 connections, both her own. Both are people she's connected to on LinkedIn but hasn't actually spoken to in 3 years. She mentions in Slack. No replies. She moves on.

Account 3 through 10: same pattern. By 11 AM she has cycled through 10 accounts, found "0 warm paths" in 7, and ambiguous Slack hints in 3. She closes Sales Nav. She opens her email cadence tool. She queues a cold outbound sequence for all 10 accounts. She knows it'll convert at 1.8%. She does it anyway because there's no other option.

"What would have actually changed my day: knowing that BigCo's CFO sat on a board with our customer Mike's former CEO 3 years ago. That HealthCo's CTO interviewed our advisor Reena for a role last fall. That FinanceCo's VP Sales is the founder of a company my CRO invested in. Sales Nav has no idea any of this exists."

The warm paths existed for every one of her 80 accounts. Somewhere in the extended company network. Sales Nav couldn't see them. So the AE defaulted to cold outbound, knowing it would fail, because the alternative was 3 weeks of Slack archaeology.

What Sales Navigator does for this scenario.

Surfaces. With one source. Then stops.

  • TeamLink. Shows mutual LinkedIn connections between your team's first-degree LinkedIn graph and the target account's employees.
  • Lead lists per account. You can save accounts and get notified about updates.
  • Real-time profile data. Each contact's LinkedIn info is current.

TeamLink is one source: reps' personal LinkedIn networks. The warmest paths usually live in the other three sources Sales Nav can't see.

Where Sales Nav stops on this scenario.

1. TeamLink sees ~10% of your company's warm graph.

Sales Nav's TeamLink only sees LinkedIn first-degree connections of your CURRENT salespeople, and only the connections those reps have manually added. It doesn't see your customers (who could intro to peer buyers at target accounts). Doesn't see your board, investors, or advisors. Doesn't see your partners. Doesn't see your alumni or former employees. The actual warm graph of your company is 5-10× bigger than what TeamLink shows.

2. LinkedIn connections aren't relationships.

Your AE has 4,000 LinkedIn connections. She knows maybe 200 of them well enough to ask a favor. The other 3,800 connected with her after a conference, a webinar, a random event years ago. TeamLink treats all 4,000 equally. The signal-to-noise ratio is brutal. Even when TeamLink surfaces a "match," the rep has to manually qualify whether the LinkedIn connection is real or theoretical.

3. No relationship scoring beyond "connected on LinkedIn."

Sales Nav has no way to gauge work overlaps, past meetings, past deals, board service together, advisor history, or customer relationship quality. It just looks at the LinkedIn graph. The richest signals, closed-won together, sat on a board together for 4 years, met at this conference 3 years in a row, are invisible to Sales Nav.

4. No proactive surfacing.

Sales Nav doesn't proactively tell the rep "here are the 3 warmest paths into your top 10 accounts this week." She has to go account-by-account, manually, every Monday. 80 accounts × 5 minutes each = 6+ hours just to query. Most reps skip it after the first 10.

5. No memory of what's already been tried.

If Sahil asked Mike for an intro into BigCo 6 months ago and Mike said no, the new AE has no idea. She'll ask Mike again. Mike will be annoyed. Or the rep will email a connector who already passed on an intro to a different rep at the same company. Connector goodwill leaks.

What about Actively, Clay, Gong? They still belong in the stack.

Each plays a role. None of them reveal the relationship graph at your target accounts.

  • Actively, intelligent automated outbound. Useful when no warm path exists. Doesn't know whether your customer Marcus used to work at the target account.
  • Clay, enrichment + workflows. Useful for outbound prep. Doesn't reveal who from your team's network knows the buyer.
  • Gong, conversational + revenue intelligence. Useful signal. Doesn't activate the connector.
  • UserGems, champion job-change alerts. Doesn't surface paths into target accounts you've never sold to.

Every tool either ignores relationships entirely or surfaces them without operationalizing them. Boomerang's $15-20K spend for a 10-rep team makes each rep 30-50% more productive by exposing the warm graph the rest of the stack can't see.

What activation looks like instead.

Boomerang shows the warm paths for all 80 accounts on Monday morning. Across 4 connector sources. Scored.

The AE opens Boomerang on Monday at 9 AM. Instead of Sales Nav showing 0-2 ambiguous LinkedIn connections per account, Boomerang shows:

  • All 80 accounts ranked by warmth. Top 12 have at least one connector path with relationship-strength score >70%. Bottom 30 have no warm paths, cold outbound is justified for those.
  • For each warm-path account: 1-5 ranked paths across all 4 connector sources. Reps + customers + board/investors/advisors + partners. Not 1 source. 4.
  • Why each path is warm. "Mike (your customer at TechCo) closed a deal with the FinanceCo VP Sales in 2022. Same vertical. Last interaction: positive renewal call 3 months ago." Specific. Score-able. Defensible.
  • Memory. "Sahil asked Mike for an intro into BigCo 6 months ago and Mike said no. Try a different connector for BigCo. Trying Reena (your advisor) instead."
  • Drafted forwardable emails per path. The AE doesn't write any cold outreach. She reviews 12 drafted asks and routes them to the right connectors.

By Monday lunch, she has 12 warm intro requests in flight to her top 12 accounts. The other 30 cold accounts get the standard cadence. The 38 in the middle get a hybrid, partial connector activation plus standard cold backup.

Her week starts with 12 warm-path conversations instead of 0. Her quarter-end conversion rate goes from 1.8% on 80 cold accounts to 25-35% on 12 warm-routed accounts.

Sales Nav showed her zero warm paths. Boomerang showed her 12, across 4 connector sources Sales Nav literally cannot see.

What the numbers say.

  • 3-5× more warm paths surfaced per account vs Sales Nav (across 4 connector sources, not 1).
  • 25-35% reply rate on warm-routed outreach vs 1.8% reply rate on cold outbound (industry baseline).
  • 50-60% rep coverage uplift, same rep, same account list, more warm conversations in motion.
  • ~6 hours/week saved per rep on manual account research alone.

This is the daily, unglamorous job that defines an AE's life. Sales Nav makes it tedious and low-yield. Boomerang makes it the highest-leverage hour of the week.

See the warm paths Boomerang would find for your top 20 accounts.

Send us your top 20 target accounts. We'll show you the warm-path map Boomerang would surface across all 4 connector sources, and the activation playbook.

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