What To Do When Your Network RUNS OUT
A network closes the big deals, but it leaves nothing underneath. Here's the prompt that finds the middle you're missing.
A bootstrapped fintech founder I met last week has closed deals most companies never see in a decade.
No outside money and no sales team. He sells through a few senior people with thirty years of relationships each, himself included.
On paper, sales is handled. Then he said the thing that gave it away:
“We have either no business outreach, or a very senior business outreach. Nothing scalable in the middle.”
A brilliant top end, an empty bottom, and nothing in between.
When a senior relationship closes, it’s enormous. But when it doesn’t, there’s nothing underneath to catch the quarter.
No steady flow of smaller, reachable companies keeping the pipeline warm between the big wins.
His product is built. It works. And the entire middle of his market has never heard of it, because reaching them was never anyone’s job.
A strong network feels like a sales engine, right up until the month it goes quiet. Then you find out it was never a system.
It was a few brilliant people and their address books, and address books run out.
This can’t be fixed with another senior hire. You need to build the repeatable layer underneath the relationships, so the pipeline stops living or dying on whether this quarter’s introduction came through.
So here’s a tool that builds the first piece of it:
Give Claude one deal you won through your network, a warm intro, a relationship, anything that didn’t come from cold outreach.
It works out what really made that company a buyer, then finds ten more in the same situation that you can reach directly, no introduction needed.
That’s the missing middle, found in a prompt: