Sign inGet your API key
ProductDocsPricingCompareBlogSign in

Glossary

What Is a Trigger?

A trigger is a specific event that starts an outreach action, and a few of them can be filtered for in a database.

Get your free API key →Free to start. No credit card. 1,000 records to spend whenever you like.

A trigger is a specific event, such as a funding round or a new executive hire, that starts a defined outreach action.

A trigger differs from a buying signal. A signal is evidence that interest may exist. A trigger is a rule: when event X happens at an account, do Y. The full sales version is covered in what is a sales trigger.

Why it matters for outbound

A trigger gives the first line of an email a reason to exist. "Congrats on the round" is a better opener than a cold pitch, because the prospect can see why you wrote today.

It also fixes the scale problem. Instead of reading news by hand, you define the event once and the same action runs for every account that matches. See trigger marketing for the campaign side.

Example

You sell onboarding software to startups. You write one rule: when a company closes a Series A, find its VP of Sales and send a short email within a week.

AccountTrigger eventAction
Acme (acme.com)Series A closed this yearEmail Jane Doe, VP Sales
Globex (globex.example)No new eventStay in the list

Acme fires the rule and Globex does not. Names and values are placeholders.

Common trigger events include a funding round, a new executive in the buyer's role, a headcount jump, a new office and a change in the tools a company runs. Pick two or three that match what you sell. A trigger that does not connect to your offer is only noise with a date on it.

In LeadOcean data

LeadOcean stores profile and company attributes, and the dataset is refreshed monthly. It does not push events to you, so it has no trigger feed or webhook. You build the rule by filtering for the state that an event leaves behind.

  • fundingType and minLastFundingYear find companies by their last funding round. Use POST /v1/companies/search or the MCP tool search_companies.
  • POST /v1/people/search takes the same funding filters plus jobLevel and jobFunction, so one call returns the buyer at each funded company. The MCP tool is search_leads.
  • technologies and technologyCategories flag a tool a company already runs, which works as a technology trigger.

Funding filters are not accepted by the free count_leads tool. To size a funding list, call search with count=true and limit set to 1, which costs nothing. Every person or company returned in a real search counts as one record.

For a ready-made version of the funding rule, see the Funding Trigger skill. The free plan gives 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month. See /pricing.

Back to the glossary.

Build a funding trigger list, free

Free to start. No credit card. 1,000 records to spend whenever you like.

Get your free API key →