Dear friends, entrepreneurs, executives, sellers and everyone in between:
We are InnerCircle and we’re proud to announce our official rebrand and v2 product release! By way of introduction, we’re an organization founded by Brian Zweig and myself (Adonis Voulgaris). We’re two friends and executives who’ve spent our careers building and growing businesses and have long discussed creating our own brand to bring our expertise to market.
We met in 2011 where Brian hired me as a sales intern at Ampush, an agency originally focused on Facebook performance marketing. This was before the newsfeed existed on Facebook, and we were selling Ampush’s services to brands looking to run ads on Facebook’s “Right Hand Rail” to buy likes for their brand page. As young professionals do, we hustled and built a system to get in front of as many high-growth, digital-first brands as possible in order to close heaps of business for Ampush. That system was built on cold email, cold calling and building great relationships with the Facebook sales team; it was orchestrated by the two of us, and a number of other hungry sales folks.
The system worked great, and in the early years, Ampush was propelled to become one of Facebook’s top 10 advertising partners! With our success, we continued on in our careers, Brian went to lead revenue and sales at multiple other organizations, including his own GTM consulting practice, while I moved into the media org at Ampush and ultimately became the GM of the business that we eventually sold to Tinuiti (10 years later)!
As a part of the pursuit of acquisition at Ampush, Brian and I partnered again to leverage Brian’s expertise as a GTM leader to help supercharge our sales efforts. This became the start of InnerCircle. We quickly learned that cold outbound tactics were no longer successful methods to get in front of prospects and as a result, began testing new means to generate qualified lead volume. While we ran many different tests to gain traction; the most immediate successes were driven by warm referrals using the Ampush Founders’ networks.
The solution we came up with was a four step process. First, we identified all the prospective leads we wanted to meet with and ultimately sell to - in this case, CMOs at brands spending more than $1MM / month on digital marketing. Second, we identified all the leads that were second degree connections to an executive at Ampush. Third, we identified the best mutual to make an introduction to the lead based on the perceived relationship between the Ampush executive and the mutual. Finally, fourth we crafted custom messages for each individual and sent them out via email.
As you can imagine, the process was incredibly cumbersome and time intensive, but the results were outstanding. We saw 100x better conversion rate from request to meeting acquired compared to any other scaled outbound tactic! From there it was obvious, we needed to find a way to productize this strategy and bring it to market, and that’s what we did.
Over the last 3 years, Brian and I have been working on an all-in-one referral management solution that:
- Partners with and leverages the power of Linkedin’s Sales Navigator
- Identifies all your high-value, prospective leads
- Scores all your existing relationships
- Generates, sends and tracks 100% of referral interactions in an easy to use platform
- And lastly, safeguards your network through a system of strict eligibility rules!
We’ve been working with a small set of customers over the last year on our beta product and are now ecstatic to release InnerCircle 2.0 to the market to help brands supercharge their networks and build a sales engine that drives guaranteed results!
Thanks so much, and welcome to the InnerCircle!
Brian and Adonis