A buying trigger is a readiness signal that has become fresh and strong enough to act on, an event such as a funding round, a leadership change or a relevant role posted, caught on an account that fits, which opens a short readiness window and turns detection into a play.
A buying trigger is not a fourth kind of signal. It is what a signal becomes the moment it is fresh and strong enough to act on, the point where detection turns into a play. A funding round sitting in a database is a company-level signal; the same round, caught this week on an account that fits, is a trigger, because now it fires something. Any signal at any level, industry, company or lead, can become a trigger. The sharp ones are the company- and industry-level events that reset an account's clock: a funding round that just closed, a senior hire with a mandate, a public security incident, a regulatory change, a relevant role posted that names the stack. An event like that turns a reasonable purchase into an urgent one, and urgency is what gets a committee past its inertia.
A trigger opens a window, and the window is short. After one fires you usually have thirty to sixty days before the account shortlists without you or settles back into inertia; the thirty to sixty days after a funding announcement is when budget is fluid. The trigger we trust most is a new revenue leader in their first ninety days. A new VP of Sales or Head of Revenue reviews what they inherited, decisions frozen for a year get made, and by some counts as much as eighty percent of their early budget is committed inside that window, before new habits harden. Then it closes.
Two cautions. An event with no behavior behind it is potential, and behavior with no event is curiosity; an event plus behavior on the same account inside the same few weeks is the window. And a trigger decays like every signal: a funding round from eighteen months ago is history, not a live trigger.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
