Known, Remembered, Chosen with Mark McIntosh

A warm introduction gets the meeting almost every time. Most firms never make one on purpose. In this episode of the IC-DISC Show, I sit down with Mark McIntosh, founder of RevGrow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, to talk about how professional service firms actually win work on LinkedIn without pitching anyone. I should disclose up front that I'm a RevGrow client, and so is my wife Christine. That's part of why I wanted Mark on the show. When I started, I had about 20 LinkedIn connections and used the platform once in a while to look someone up before a meeting. Today I have more than 4,000, and I've picked up clients who found me by searching for IC-DISC. Mark grew up in a small farming town in Illinois and came to Texas in 2011 doing business development for Crowe, the CPA firm, before building RevGrow around a done-for-you approach he calls non-salesy. He walked through the mechanics: the profile rewrite, the Sales Navigator searches that surface both ideal clients and referral partners, the messaging that gives first, and the daily outreach his team runs for review and approval. The part that surprised me most was what he does with warm introductions. Mark treats them as something you engineer rather than something you wait for, running reports to find who in a client's network can open a door, then making the introduction respectfully instead of pitching through it. I also shared a case study of my own from an industry conference, where a mass email produced opt-out rates we'd never seen before and no meetings at all, and the same list approached through LinkedIn filled my calendar until I had to ask them to stop. Mark's second book with 90-Minute Books, Known, Remembered, and Chosen, was about two weeks from finished when we recorded. Show highlights Twenty connections to more than 4,000, and clients who arrived by searching LinkedIn for IC-DISC, from a platform I'd barely used. An introduction from someone a person already knows and trusts converts at roughly 95%, which is why Mark builds a process around introductions rather than leaving them to chance. Referrals are great but unpredictable, and there are rarely enough of them, so the fix is to start conversations on purpose instead of waiting. The same conference attendee list produced opt-out rates we'd never seen before by email, and 20 booked meetings through LinkedIn, before I had to call it off for lack of calendar space. Our own return on what we've spent with RevGrow is running at roughly 10 times, and it keeps climbing because the revenue recurs after the spending stops. Recipients decide in about 20 seconds whether to reply, so the profile and the first message have to connect the dots for them immediately. The economics need a client worth having: RevGrow's clients typically see lifetime values from $25,000 up to about a million. Most firms are already sitting on 5,000 or 6,000 connections they've never worked, which Mark describes as having all the gold you need in your existing network. Links LinkedIn - Mark McIntosh RevGrow About IC-DISC Alliance Show notes: https://exportadvisors.com/podcast/076-known-remembered-chosen-with-mark-mcintosh/