What Is a Warm Introduction, and How Do You Find One?
Radarr checks every BD signal against your team's LinkedIn network automatically.
A warm introduction is when someone you already know — a colleague, a former client, a connection — vouches for you or makes the first contact with a prospect on your behalf, instead of you reaching out cold. Agencies find warm introductions by systematically cross-referencing their team's existing network against target companies, rather than relying on memory or chance.
Why warm introductions matter so much in agency BD
Response rates to warm introductions are dramatically higher than cold outreach — not because the pitch is any different, but because trust is transferred the moment someone you already respect makes the connection. A cold email has to earn trust from zero. A warm intro starts with trust already borrowed.
The problem most agencies have isn't a lack of warm connections — it's that nobody has time to check, every single day, whether someone on a 15-person team happens to already know somebody at the exact company that just showed up as a BD opportunity. That knowledge is usually scattered across a dozen individual LinkedIn networks that nobody has actually cross-referenced against the target list.
How to systematically find warm paths (not just hope you remember one)
Export your team's LinkedIn connections. Every team member can export their own connections as a CSV from LinkedIn's data export tool.
Consolidate them into one list — company, name, title, and who on your team knows them.
Cross-reference that list against every company you're targeting, not just the ones you're currently pitching. A connection at a company you'll target in six months is just as valuable to know about now.
Match on company name carefully — this is harder than it sounds. Company names get abbreviated, spelled differently, or written with different suffixes ("Acme Inc" vs "Acme Corporation" vs "Acme"), so a naive exact-match check will miss most real matches.
Ask for the introduction, don't just cold-connect. If a match exists, the highest-value move is asking the connected team member for a direct introduction — not sending your own cold LinkedIn note to the prospect and pretending the connection doesn't exist.
Does this scale beyond a spreadsheet?
Manually doing this cross-reference works for a handful of target companies. It breaks down fast once you're tracking signals across dozens of companies a week — which is exactly the volume a live BD signal feed produces. Radarr automates this step: every signal that comes in is automatically checked against your team's uploaded network, so you know at a glance whether a given opportunity has a warm path before you ever draft an email.
FAQ
Is a warm introduction always better than cold outreach?
Almost always, when one is available — but don't let the absence of a warm path stop you from reaching out cold. Most real BD pipelines are a mix of both.
How often should we re-check for warm connections?
Every time a new signal or target company appears — networks change constantly as people change jobs, and a connection that didn't exist last month might exist today.
What if two people on the team know the same contact?
Pick whoever has the stronger or more recent relationship — a warm intro from someone who barely remembers the connection isn't much better than cold outreach.