What Are the Best Trigger Events for Outbound Prospecting?
The best trigger events for outbound prospecting change who feels a problem or who can spend money on it. A new leader who inherited a metric that's off track, a funding round with a stated plan, a regulation with a deadline. An event that changes neither isn't worth a call.
A new VP, a funding round, a competitor's outage. Alert tools flag every one of them.
What Makes an Event a Trigger Event?
An event is a trigger when it makes a specific person's job harder in a way you address, or gives a specific person new budget or authority to fix something. Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto built a prospecting method around this idea in their 2010 book Shift!. Their point is that the event matters because of what it does to someone inside the company.
So the test has two questions. Did this event make someone's job harder in a way your product helps with? Did it give someone money or authority they didn't have last month? A yes to either earns the account an hour. Two noes, and you can skip it.
Which Trigger Events Are Worth Acting On?
Each of these puts a specific person in a new position.
A new leader over the function you sell into. Donald Schepker and colleagues, in a 2017 meta-analysis in The Leadership Quarterly covering a large body of executive successions, found that a change of chief executive is reliably followed by strategic change, with outside hires changing the most.
The study covers CEOs. A new leader over the function you sell into is in a similar position on a smaller scale, holding a metric they didn't choose and permission to change how it gets met.
A funding round with a stated plan. A raise announced with a plan to grow a specific function creates budget and a deadline in that function.
Antonio Davila, George Foster, and Mahendra Gupta, in a 2003 Journal of Business Venturing study of startup headcount around venture capital rounds, found that employee numbers rose in the months before a round and rose further in the months after it. Check the careers page in the weeks after the announcement. The new listings can show which functions are growing, and sometimes which manager is hiring.
A regulation, audit, or contract with a date. A date sets when the problem has to be solved and who has to meet it.
A public failure in your category. An outage, a breach, or a missed launch the company had to explain gives someone a fresh mandate to fix it.
A former customer's champion who moved companies. UserGems, in a 2023 analysis of its own customer data, reported that people who had championed a product and then changed jobs rarely bought it again on their own, and became a meaningful source of revenue once someone reached out. That is the vendor's own data. The person already knows what the product does.
Which Trigger Events Aren't Worth a Call?
Awards, office moves, rebrands, and executives speaking at conferences change nobody's problem and nobody's budget. Neither does a funding round with no stated plan, or a growth headline about last year.
Alert tools surface these because they are easy to detect. Before adding an alert type to your feed, run one past example through the two questions. If it wouldn't have passed, turn that alert type off.
A new leader in a function you don't sell to belongs here too. A new CFO is a trigger for finance software. For everyone else, a new CFO matters only if they arrive with a cost-cutting mandate that puts your category's contracts under review.
Where Do I Find Trigger Events without a Paid Tool?
The events that pass the test are public, and free to check.
Leadership changes. Company news pages and announcement posts from new leaders.
Hiring. The company's own careers page.
Funding and plans. Press releases, and the investor page for public companies.
Deadlines. Regulator calendars and industry news for the rules that affect your buyers.
Failures. Public status pages and the company's own incident notes.
Check your most promising accounts weekly. The rest of the list can wait for an alert.
How Fresh Does a Trigger Event Need to Be?
Act while the person is still new to the problem. Schepker's meta-analysis also reported that new chief executives face short-term pressure to perform. Reach a new leader in their first months, while they are still deciding what to change.
Donald Hambrick and G. D. S. Fukutomi, in a 1991 Academy of Management Review article, proposed that a chief executive's tenure moves through seasons. It starts with a response to the mandate the executive was hired with and a period of experimentation, followed by the selection of an enduring theme. Their model is a theory about CEOs.
For a new leader in your function, watch for the theme. Once they announce a named program or a set of priorities, check whether your product fits it before you write.
For the other events, the date on the event tells you how long you have. A regulation with a deadline months away gives you until the company starts planning for it. A public outage is freshest in the week it's being explained.
How Do I Mention a Trigger Event without Sounding Intrusive?
Mention what the company made public, and leave out anything you pieced together. Elizabeth Aguirre and colleagues, in a 2015 Journal of Retailing study, found that personalized online ads drew more clicks when people believed their information had been collected openly, and fewer when the collection felt covert.
An announcement, a filing, a job listing, and a press release are public. A detail from someone's personal profile or a scraped internal document reads as surveillance, even when it's accurate. Name the public event, connect it to the problem it created for their team, and stop there.
Tiffany White, Debra Zahay, Helge Thorbjørnsen, and Sharon Shavitt, in a 2008 Marketing Letters study of how consumers responded to personalized email offers, found that highly personalized messages drew resistance when the firm didn't explain why the offer fit the person. The resistance showed up mainly among people who saw little value in the service.
A cold prospect may not yet see much value in your product, which puts them closer to the group that resisted. State in one sentence why the event bears on their team's work.
Tomorrow morning, take the top ten alerts in your feed and call only the ones where you can name the person the event affected.
References & Related Reading
Shift!: Harness the Trigger Events That Turn Prospects into Customers, Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto, 2010.
CEO succession, strategic change, and post-succession performance: A meta-analysis, Donald J. Schepker, Youngsang Kim, Pankaj C. Patel, Sherry M. B. Thatcher, and Michael C. Campion, The Leadership Quarterly, 2017.
UserGems Sheds Light on Revenue Potential of "Forgotten Champions", UserGems, 2023.
Unraveling the Personalization Paradox, Elizabeth Aguirre, Dominik Mahr, Dhruv Grewal, Ko de Ruyter, and Martin Wetzels, Journal of Retailing, 2015.
Venture Capital Financing and the Growth of Startup Firms, Antonio Davila, George Foster, and Mahendra Gupta, Journal of Business Venturing, 2003.
The Seasons of a CEO's Tenure, Donald C. Hambrick and G. D. S. Fukutomi, Academy of Management Review, 1991.
Getting Too Personal: Reactance to Highly Personalized Email Solicitations, Tiffany Barnett White, Debra L. Zahay, Helge Thorbjørnsen, and Sharon Shavitt, Marketing Letters, 2008.
