Tactics and plays

What is the best way to get an introduction to the CRO at a target account?

Work backwards from who already knows them rather than forwards from the org chart. Find every person connected to that CRO - former colleagues, your own executives, shared investors, customers who worked with them - rank those connections by how strong they actually are, then ask the strongest one for a specific, forwardable introduction. The route almost never runs through your sales team.

October 2, 2026

Why direct outreach to a CRO fails

A CRO receives more cold outreach than almost any other role in B2B, because every sales tool on the market targets them. Their filter is correspondingly brutal, and it is tuned on exactly the patterns a well-written cold email uses.

The one thing that reliably clears it is a name they recognise in the "from" line, or in the first sentence.

The five routes, in order of strength

1. A former colleague. Someone who worked with them, ideally on the same team, ideally for more than a year. This is the strongest route and the hardest to find manually, because the overlap is usually two or three jobs ago and in nobody's CRM.

2. One of your executives. Peer-to-peer works. Your CRO asking their CRO for 20 minutes is a different request from an SDR asking. Executives are usually willing and almost never asked, because nobody knows which of their relationships is relevant.

3. A shared investor or board member. If your investors overlap with theirs, that is a direct line. Underused because people over-estimate the cost of asking.

4. A happy customer who knows them. The most credible of all, because the introducer has nothing to gain. Also the one most likely to be refused if you have not earned it.

5. A mutual vendor or partner. Weaker, but real - the partnerships team at a company you both buy from often knows both sides.

How to actually find the route

Manually, you can check LinkedIn for shared connections, which shows you a list and tells you nothing about strength. Three hundred "mutual connections" where nobody has spoken in eight years is noise.

What you want is the relationships your company can actually act on: who has genuinely worked with this person, who still speaks to them, and who would say yes. That means looking across everyone at your company rather than everyone on LinkedIn - which is the job relationship intelligence does.

How to ask so it works

The failure mode is making the introducer do work. Send them a note they can forward without editing:

Two sentences on who you are and why it is relevant to the CRO, not to you.
One specific ask: twenty minutes, a named topic.
An explicit out: "no problem at all if it is not a fit".

Then do not chase twice. A connector who feels billed for a favour will not give you a second one, and the second one is usually worth more.

What to do when there is no path

Go one level down. The VP of Sales Ops or the Director of RevOps is far easier to reach, usually more responsive, and often the person the CRO asks for an opinion anyway. An internal referral upward is worth more than a cold email downward.