Buying and evaluation

How do I prove the ROI of relationship intelligence to a sceptical buyer?

Measure coverage first and conversion second. Run the tool against a real target account list and count how many accounts come back with a path someone would actually use. That number is checkable in days and is the honest predictor. Pipeline attribution comes later, takes a quarter, and is always arguable - so do not lead with it.

October 2, 2026

Why the usual ROI pitch fails with a sceptic

The standard argument is a conversion multiple: warm introductions close some number of times better than cold outreach.

A sceptical buyer is right to push back. Most of the widely quoted multiples trace to vendor marketing rather than published research, and almost none disclose their method or control group. Leading with a number you cannot defend costs you the rest of the conversation.

The direction is not seriously disputed - a referred opportunity converts better and moves faster. The size of the gap depends on your market, deal size and who makes the introduction, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling.

The measurement that is actually honest

Step 1 - Coverage, measurable in days.

Take fifty target accounts you genuinely want and have not cracked. Run the tool. Count:

Measure	What it tells you
Accounts with any path	Raw reach
Accounts with a path a rep would actually use	The real number - most tools inflate the first
Paths held outside the sales team	Whether it found what you could not already see
Paths into accounts with no prior relationship	The hardest and most valuable case

The gap between the first and second row is where evaluations go wrong. A tool that returns a path to every account by counting weak LinkedIn ties has 100% coverage and no value.

Step 2 - Conversion, measurable in a quarter.

Of the paths a rep actually used: how many introductions were asked for, granted, and turned into a meeting. Compare against the same team's cold-outreach rate over the same period.

Report it as a difference, never as attribution

Single-touch attribution will always undercount this category, because its effect is on relationships rather than clicks - the stalled deal that restarted, the second stakeholder who now takes calls.

So report the comparison: these accounts had paths and were worked that way; those comparable accounts were not. State plainly that it is not a true control group.

What to put in front of a CFO

Coverage on our own account list - a hard number, produced in a week.
Meetings booked through a named introducer - countable, and hard to dispute.
Stalled deals that restarted.
Time reps stopped spending hunting for warm paths manually.

The one thing that destroys credibility

Claiming a precise multiple for something you did not measure. A sceptical buyer who catches one unsupported number discounts every other number on the page - and this is a category where the defensible numbers are good enough on their own.