How do you find who knows someone at a target account?

The fastest way is to stop hunting manually. Scrolling LinkedIn looking for mutual connections, sending "does anyone know X?" Slack messages, or guessing based on who someone went to school with — all of these work sometimes, but they're slow, unpredictable, and they only surface the connections you already know to look for.

Why this is harder than it looks

Most sales teams have connections to their target accounts and don't know it. The paths exist — but they're spread across the team, buried in second-degree relationships nobody's mapped, and invisible in the tools everyone uses every day. Your CRM shows who you've emailed. LinkedIn shows who you've connected with. Neither shows how reachable an account actually is through your real network.

What works better

The approach that consistently surfaces real paths:

• Start with the target, not your own contacts — search by the person or company you want to reach
• Look across the full team network, not just your own connections
• Weight relationships by quality, not just proximity — shared work history beats a loose LinkedIn connection
• Include advisors, investors, and past customers in the search — not just current colleagues

When you do that systematically, you find paths you'd never surface by scrolling alone.