The phrase covers three products that barely overlap, and buying the wrong one is the most common mistake in this category.
Pathfinding. Given a target company, who at my company can get me in? Built for B2B sales teams working named accounts.
Relationship CRM. A system of record for an investor or dealmaker whose job is the network itself. Built for VC, private equity, banking and professional services.
Stakeholder mapping. Inside an open deal, drawing the buying committee and spotting who you have not met. Often a feature rather than a product.
Orbb maps a company's own network from its team's interactions and public work history, then ranks warm paths into target accounts, naming the colleague who would make the introduction. Built for B2B revenue teams selling into named enterprise accounts. Customers include Cresta, Walnut, Centrical, Quicklizard and ConnectAndSell.
Introhive is the enterprise incumbent, strongest in professional services - legal, accounting, consulting - where relationship analytics inside the CRM is the established use case. Large deployments, correspondingly heavier.
Connect the Dots builds a graph shared across its users, so your coverage benefits from other customers. That is a real advantage on coverage and a real trade-off on data governance. Worth deciding deliberately which side you want.
Affinity is the standard in venture capital and private equity. If your job is to maintain a network over years rather than break into accounts this quarter, this is the category you want.
4Degrees serves the same shape of buyer, smaller and more focused.
Both will disappoint a B2B sales team, because they are designed to record relationships rather than to find routes through them.
Clay enriches and researches at scale. Superb at it; it does not know who your CTO used to work with.
ZoomInfo and Apollo sell contact data. They tell you a person exists and how to email them, which is the opposite end of the problem.
UserGems tracks job changes among your known contacts. Narrow and very good at the one thing.
Common Room watches public community and social signal. Different signal, different job.
Ask: when this tool returns a result, does a rep know who to ask, or do they know a fact?
"Your VP of Engineering worked with their CTO at Datadog for four years" is something to act on. "You have 11 connections at Acme" is something to look at. The first wins deals.
Hand the vendor 50 accounts from your real target list and count how many come back with a path a rep would actually use. The number is usually far below the demo, and the gap between vendors is far larger than their marketing suggests.