One of the more standard requests we get here is to take a CRM database and add ‘More Like This’ records. In other words, adding prospective new customers that are almost exactly like your current customers.
The process is typically one of analyzing the CRM database for key metrics (industry segments, firmographics, job titles, etc.) and then ‘boiling the ocean’ to find new prospective contacts ‘in the wild’ (on the Internet now, in a snapshot of the Internet embedded in an AI LLM) via a semi-automated process. There is a better way to perform this task, however.
Mining the business networks of existing customers using tools like Boardroom Insiders or LinkedIn establishes rock-solid links between former colleagues, fellow board members, people who have collaborated at industry events, members of the same professional associations, and professional peers in general. These are all remarkably valuable cohorts that can be appended with their business email addresses (using our email discovery and validation tool) and they are inherently more targeted than any commercially available lists.
So, will this type of what you could call ‘forced referrals’ become as much of a bedrock marketing mechanism as ‘renewals at birth,’ ‘forced free trials,’ or “till forbid”? Time will tell, but there’s reason to believe that the method’s foundation is so fundamentally sound that it could very easily become part of every b-to-b marketer’s standard operating procedure.
