THE SOVEREIGN SELLER #29

The Power of Triggers in Prospecting

Sunday March 22nd, 2026 Syracuse, IN 7:11 AM

It was a normal weekday morning sometime in the mid-1990s when I found out a huge retailer was coming to town.

I found out from the business journal - the one I paid for out of my own pocket because nobody else in the office thought it was worth the subscription.

I considered it my treasure map.

Circuit City was coming to Indy ... And I worked for the only major newspaper in town ... And they ran a ton of newspaper advertising!

I put the journal down, picked up the phone, and called their regional marketing office before lunch.

That single piece of intelligence became a multi-million dollar account.

Full-page newspaper ads. Weekly inserts. Each page running close to twenty thousand dollars. Each insert the same.

Most of my colleagues didn't find out for months - because they were working blind.

They were doing what most salespeople do: showing up, dialing, hoping. Mistaking volume for strategy. Mistaking motion for intelligence.

That is the villain in every sales story I have ever lived. The grinding, exhausting, dignity-eroding practice of cold outreach aimed at nobody in particular, for no particular reason, at no particular moment. I call it haphazard prospecting.

It is labor without leverage. And I spent years doing it before I understood there was another way.

By 2018, I was at Ball State Athletics - arguably the least popular Division I program in college sports. I've covered this before. It was the hardest sales environment I had ever worked in.

I ran the old playbook first. Cold calls. Cold emails. LinkedIn messages sent into the void.

It wasn't working.

Then, slowly, I started seeing the campus differently.

I noticed which service trucks kept appearing outside the administration building. Same construction company. Same commercial cleaning fleet. Same landscaping crew, week after week. These weren't random vendors - they were businesses with a proven relationship to the university.

They were already invested. They just didn't have a sponsorship yet.

I started subscribing to local news, just like I had in my newspaper days. Articles announcing a new coffee shop opening near campus. A restaurant signing a lease on the main drag. A regional retailer expanding into Muncie.

Each one a business that needed local visibility, needed to reach students and faculty, needed to establish itself quickly in a market it didn't own yet.

I monitored the campus newspaper for advertisers. I watched local radio spots and noted which companies were spending. I paid attention at Chamber events - who was there, who was handing out cards, who was telling the story of a business in growth mode.

And then there was the hospitality signal. When a business owner or company bought season tickets or leased a suite, they weren't just buying seats. They were telling me something. They were telling me they believed in using relationships and entertainment as a business tool. They were already halfway to a sponsorship conversation before I ever called.

These were triggers. All of them.

The Power of Triggers

Every market - no matter how competitive or commoditized - is full of businesses going through changes right now. Mergers. New hires. Funding rounds. Expansions. Leadership transitions. New locations. New budgets. New mandates. New problems.

Change is the buying signal. Change is the trigger.

The research backs up what I was seeing in the field.

A newly appointed executive is up to ten times more likely to purchase new products than their predecessor - and 80% of new decision-makers will spend significant money on new initiatives within their first ninety days.

Companies that just closed a funding round are up to eight times more likely to make a purchase. And the first seller to reach a prospect after a trigger event is five times more likely to win the sale.

I call this framework Trigger Prospecting - and it is one of the most powerful tools for building a target list that is genuinely worth calling.

There is software built specifically for this now. Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and newer AI platforms can automate the detection of funding rounds, leadership changes, hiring patterns, and technology migrations in real time. They are worth exploring.

But some of the best triggers I ever found - a fleet of trucks outside a building, a name mentioned at a Chamber breakfast, an ad that ran three weeks in a row in a local paper - no algorithm would have caught them.

They required a human being paying attention to the world around them.

The software gives you scale. The instinct gives you edge.

A word for both sides of this audience.

If you are an individual salesperson, your most valuable prospecting asset is not your CRM or your email sequence.

It is your curiosity.

The business journal or trade pub nobody else subscribes to. The local news alert nobody else set up. The walk across campus nobody else bothered to take.

You cannot manufacture the trigger - but you can be the only person in your market watching for it.

If you are a sales leader or business owner: are you building a system around trigger signals?

Set up Google Alerts for your top target accounts. Track job postings - a wave of new hires in sales or marketing is a company in motion. Subscribe to the local business journal your reps aren't reading. Build the trigger list before you build the call list.

The salesperson who finds the trigger wins the meeting. The leader who builds the system wins the market.

To your success,

Shane