Companies do not buy at random. Most purchases start with a change: a new site, a growing team, a new manager, a new law. Salespeople call such a change a trigger event, and the public traces it leaves, such as a press release or a job ad, buying signals. A trigger does not mean a company will buy. It means a need may have just appeared, and that a message about it is more likely to be welcome now than in a year.
Not every piece of news is a signal. A new logo or a summer party changes nothing about what a company needs. That is noise. Whether something is a signal also depends on what you sell: a new warehouse matters to a route planning company, but not to a seller of language courses.
Five ideas to keep in mind:
Fit first. A strong signal at a company outside your ideal customer profile is still a poor lead.
Freshness. Signals lose value quickly. After a few months the decision may have been made, possibly with someone else.
Stacking. Two or three signals at the same company (funding, then 25 job ads, then a new head of HR) make a much stronger case than one.
Check the source. A press release or a commercial register entry is reliable; an anonymous rumour is not.
Company, not private life. Use what a company publishes and what people share in their work role. Private accounts, family and personal events are off limits.
In the tasks, you work for Fabrikam, a fictional company that sells HR and payroll software to companies with 50 to 500 employees. All companies and events are invented. Task 3 follows a new law from the day it is passed to its deadline: think about when in that sequence a message from Fabrikam would be most useful.
Teacher notes
How to run it (about 25 minutes)
7 minutes: read the introduction together. Ask for one trigger event the class has seen in local news, such as a new store, a factory expansion or a new law.
12 minutes: learners do the five tasks alone. To collect results, open "Use it with a class", copy the class link and read the result codes in the class results page.
6 minutes: discuss disagreements and the questions below.
Common mistakes
Calling every piece of company news a signal. Ask each time: what changes for the company, and does that change create a need for what we sell?
"An employee liked one of our posts" feels like interest, but one like says almost nothing about a company's needs. It is at most a weak hint, not a trigger.
In the law timeline, putting "companies compare providers" before "companies check their tools". A company first notices that its tools are not enough, then looks around.
In the second order task, contacting the company before checking fit and source. A wrong or irrelevant signal makes a message worse, not better.
Treating regulation as bad news only. A new legal duty is one of the clearest signals there is, because it comes with a deadline.
Follow-up questions
Pick one trigger from task 1 and write the first two sentences of an email that uses it, naming the source.
Which of the trigger events would you expect to see first in a job ad, and which in the commercial register?
How long would you say each signal in task 2 stays fresh? There is no fixed rule: make an estimate and justify it.
Where do you find signals without crossing into private information? Compare your ideas with the source table in the account research lesson.
How you may get in touch depends on the channel and the country: see where B2B leads come from.