Finding Decision-Makers in 60 Seconds

Why you’re wasting time on the wrong people

In modern B2B sales, the problem is rarely a lack of leads—it’s a lack of access to the right humans. Reps burn hours emailing “contacts” who happily take meetings but can’t sign contracts, approve budgets, or push deals over the line.

The result? Bloated pipelines, fake forecast, and deals that stall at “I’ll talk to my manager”. Without clear visibility into who actually owns the decision, your sales motion becomes guesswork instead of strategy.

AI-powered relationship intelligence flips this script. Instead of asking “Who should we talk to?”, you instantly see who holds power, who influences them, and what path gets you to a real decision-maker in the shortest time.

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What “decision-maker in 60 seconds” really means

“Finding decision-makers in 60 seconds” doesn’t mean magic. It means using AI to compress what used to take hours of LinkedIn stalking, CRM digging, and internal Slack threads into a single, focused view.

Instead of starting from a random contact, you start from a relationship intelligence graph that combines:

• Org structure signals: reporting lines, titles, and role changes
• Engagement signals: who opened, replied, attended, or forwarded your content
• Internal relationship signals: who your team already knows and how strong those connections are
• Deal context signals: who was involved in similar closed-won deals in the past

When these signals are unified, AI can highlight the most likely decision-makers and key influencers for a given account—before you’ve even sent your first email.

“The first 60 seconds used to be ‘Who should I even talk to?’. Now it’s ‘Here are the three people that actually matter—and who can introduce me to them.’”

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The anatomy of AI-powered relationship intelligence

Relationship intelligence is more than contact data enriched with fancy tags. It’s a living network model of your market that understands how people, companies, and interactions connect to each other over time.

1. Mapping power, not just titles

Traditional tools stop at static information: titles, departments, and seniority. But seniority isn’t the same as power. A Director might be the real champion, while a VP just rubber-stamps deals at the end.

Relationship intelligence engines analyze:

• Communication density: who emails whom, how often, and in which direction
• Meeting behavior: who joins key calls, who gets added late, who never misses a milestone
• Decision fingerprints: recurring patterns of roles involved in past approvals

From these patterns, the system infers who is a decision-maker, who is an influencer, and who is a blocker—even if their title doesn’t say “VP” or “C-level”.

2. Surfacing the warmest possible path

Knowing who to reach is half the battle. The other half is knowing how to reach them without being ignored. Instead of cold outreach, relationship intelligence highlights the warmest path to a decision-maker.

This can include:

• Internal connectors: colleagues who are already connected on LinkedIn or by email history
• Customer connectors: champions in other accounts willing to introduce you across their network
• Partner connectors: resellers, advisors, or investors with trusted access to key stakeholders

Within seconds, a rep can see: “Your teammate Dana has a strong relationship with the CFO. Ask for an intro instead of cold emailing.”

3. Prioritizing who to contact first, second, and third

Relationship intelligence doesn’t just list names. It ranks them by deal impact probability. That means:

• Tier 1: Likely economic buyers and final approvers
• Tier 2: Influential stakeholders who can champion or block the deal
• Tier 3: Operational users and information sources

Your outreach sequence stops being random and becomes intentional. You’re no longer hoping the right person eventually sees your email—you’re targeting them from the start.

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A concrete workflow: From random contact to real decision-maker

Let’s turn this into a real, repeatable motion your team can run on every account. No timelines, no vague “phases”—just a clear, concrete workflow.

Step 1: Start from the account, not the person

Instead of starting with “Who do we know at X?”, start with: “What does a winning buying committee look like for companies like X?”. Relationship intelligence uses your historical deals to answer that.

The system surfaces a pattern such as:

• Economic buyer: CFO or VP Finance
• Business owner: VP Sales / CRO
• Technical gatekeeper: Head of RevOps or SalesOps
• Security / compliance: InfoSec lead (for larger deals)

Now you’re not guessing. You’re aiming for a known decision structure that has already produced closed-won deals.

Step 2: Let AI highlight the three most critical people

With the buying committee pattern defined, the AI scans the specific account and returns the top three humans who are most likely to shape the outcome of your deal.

For each person, you see:

• Role in decision: economic buyer, influencer, technical gatekeeper, or blocker
• Relationship strength: how close your company (or partners) already are to them
• Recommended motion: intro path, direct outreach, or nurture first

This entire step takes seconds. No manual research, no guessing who “owns” the decision.

Step 3: Choose the warmest route, not the fastest send

The fastest way to send a message is rarely the fastest way to open a door. Instead of defaulting to cold outreach, you use relationship intelligence to choose the warmest available route.

A practical pattern:

• Check internal connectors: Who in your org knows this person directly?
• Check customer connectors: Which champions or advisors are one hop away?
• Only then, go cold: With context from the relationship graph baked into your message.

This approach doesn’t just increase reply rates—it increases senior-level reply rates from people who actually have budget authority.

Step 4: Align your narrative to their role in the decision

A CFO, a RevOps leader, and a sales manager care about very different things. Relationship intelligence doesn’t just say who they are—it explains how they relate to the decision, so your narrative can match their reality.

For example:

• Economic buyer: focus on ROI, risk, and total cost of inaction
• Influencer: focus on how this makes them look smart, effective, and forward-thinking
• Technical gatekeeper: focus on integration, data quality, and operational load

When your outreach, deck, and follow-up reflect these angles, stakeholders see you as aligned with their world—not just pushing a product.

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Real-world impact: From “random meetings” to controlled access

Relationship intelligence doesn’t simply make prospecting more efficient—it changes the type of meetings you get. Instead of piling up demos with users who can’t buy, you land fewer but far more meaningful conversations with people who can move money.

Story 1: Cutting 40% of meetings, growing revenue

A mid-market SaaS company used AI-powered relationship intelligence to analyze twelve months of pipeline. They discovered that over 40% of their meetings were with non-decision-makers who never touched final approvals.

By redirecting effort toward identified economic buyers and key influencers, they:

• Shortened sales cycles by engaging decision-makers earlier
• Increased average deal size by bringing in budget owners sooner
• Improved forecast accuracy because “commit” now meant “we spoke to the actual buyer”

Story 2: Turning internal relationships into a strategic asset

Another team plugged their email and meeting data into a relationship intelligence system. They realized that several senior executives had deep, dormant relationships with strategic target accounts that sales had never used.

With a structured ask playbook (“Here’s why this matters, here’s who to intro, here’s the one-line ask”), they activated those relationships and:

• Opened doors at C-level that SDRs had been chasing for months
• Lifted win rates on strategic accounts where warm intros replaced cold sequences
• Reframed exec time from random favors into a measurable revenue lever

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How to make relationship intelligence part of the way you sell

Tools alone don’t change outcomes. What changes outcomes is when relationship intelligence becomes a default step in how your team works every single day.

Embed it into your sales motion, not as an extra task

If reps see relationship intelligence as “one more thing” they have to check, they won’t use it. Instead, make it the surface where they already live:

• Inside the CRM: decision-maker maps visible directly in account and opportunity views
• Inside the inbox: recommended stakeholders surfaced when writing or receiving emails
• Inside workflows: triggers that suggest next-best contacts when deals stall

Measure what matters: access to power, not just activity

Traditional dashboards obsess over dials and emails sent. Relationship intelligence lets you track far more meaningful metrics:

• Time-to-decision-maker: how long it takes from first touch to a real buyer conversation
• Decision-maker coverage: % of opportunities with at least one identified economic buyer engaged
• Influencer density: number of active champions per strategic deal

When you optimize for these metrics, your team naturally moves closer to the people who move deals.

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From guessing to knowing: The new standard in B2B access

The era of throwing sequences at anyone with “Manager” or “Director” in their title is over. Teams that win consistently are those that treat access to decision-makers as a science, not as luck.

AI-powered relationship intelligence gives you that science. In under 60 seconds, you can see:

• Who actually decides whether your deal moves forward
• Who influences them from the side, quietly
• How to reach them through the warmest, highest-trust path

From there, everything else—your messaging, your meetings, your forecasts—becomes sharper. You’re not just selling harder. You’re selling smarter, to people who can say “yes”.