It's Tuesday morning, week 9 of the quarter. The forecast call ran an hour over. Three deals shifted to "Best Case" that were called "Commit" two weeks ago. One of them, a $300K deal at FinTech Co, has gone dark on the EB.
The CRO asks the question RevOps has heard a thousand times: "Who do we know at FinTech Co? Is anyone on our board connected to the CFO? Did Tom from our customer team work with their VP Finance at a previous company?"
RevOps doesn't know. The rep on the account doesn't know either. So everyone does what everyone has always done.
"Open Sales Nav. Search 'FinTech Co' in TeamLink. See if any of the reps have first-degree connections to the EB. Slack the channel: 'anyone know Sarah at FinTech Co?' Wait. Hope. By Friday, you have one ambiguous 'I used to work with her at a vendor.' Monday the deal slipped to Q+1."
By the time you've searched, the deal is gone. Not because the relationships didn't exist. Because the activation should have happened two weeks ago, when the signals first started flashing.