Drew Sechrist on Trust & Relationships at Connect The Dots

In this episode, Avanish and Drew discuss:

• Drew’s early journey from systems integrator to one of Salesforce’s first top sales leaders
• How Salesforce’s “connect the dots” sales motion enabled enterprise expansion beyond PLG
• Why relationship visibility—not lack of relationships—is the real bottleneck in enterprise sales
• The concept of “social capital” and why misused intros burn trust instead of creating it
• CTD’s hybrid model for individuals and enterprises—and why both matter
• Drew’s vision for CTD as a trust layer and emerging relationship platform

Host Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early to mid-stage startups in Silicon Valley.

About Drew Sechrist

Drew Sechrist is a Salesforce veteran who helped grow the company from $0 to over $1B in revenue. As the #1 global sales manager and account executive, Drew mastered the art of leveraging relationships for warm introductions to close deals faster and bigger.

With co-founder Ian Swinson, another Salesforce alum with deep expertise in CRM and social networks, they’ve built Connect The Dots™ to empower professionals and companies to harness the power of their networks. The vision? A free, intuitive way for individuals to carry their relationships with them, while helping companies replace expensive, ineffective cold outreach with strategic network intelligence.

About Connect The Dots (CTD)

CTD is the Relationship Activation Platform that helps go-to-market teams instantly find and request introductions to key decision-makers using real relationships from across their company, board, investors, advisors, customer champions, and more.

Whether it’s a warm path through your CEO, a trusted investor, a strategic partner, or even a personal connection, CTD reveals who actually knows your target buyers and makes it easy to request and track trusted intros at scale. We turn hidden networks into a repeatable, high-impact channel for modern sales teams. Learn more at www.ctd.ai

About Tidemark

Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.

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