What it is
A trigger event is a discrete, dateable occurrence at a target company: a funding round, a new leadership hire, an office expansion, a merger or acquisition, a tech-stack change, a headcount spike. What makes it a trigger event rather than background noise is that it is specific and datable. You can point to it: "announced 12 March", "posted on LinkedIn last Tuesday", "filed with Companies House this week". It is not a vague sense that a company might be doing well. It is a named thing that happened, on a day you can cite in your opener.
It is worth keeping distinct from its two close neighbours. Buying signal is the wider category: any observable event, of which a trigger event is the concrete instance the category is built from. Intent data sits earlier and is behavioural, the research a company does quietly before anything becomes public, whereas a trigger event is the public, confirmable moment itself. In practice recruiters use "signal" and "trigger event" almost interchangeably, but the useful distinction is that a trigger event always has a date and a source attached to it, not just a category label.
A trigger event is not a vibe. It is a date, a source and a reason that still matters this week.
Why it matters
A trigger event is what makes outreach timely instead of generic. A message that opens with "congratulations on the Series B" or "saw you just opened a Berlin office" reads as researched and relevant, because it references something real that happened to that specific company this week. The same message sent with no trigger reads as a template, because it is one. Recruiters who wait for a dated reason to reach out are working a much smaller, much warmer list than recruiters working a flat, undifferentiated one.
The window matters too. A trigger event is most useful in the days immediately after it happens, before the resulting hiring need is public, before a role hits the job boards and before every other agency working the same market has seen the same headline. Most desks catch trigger events late, if at all, because nobody has time to watch dozens of sources for every account on the target list every day. By the time a consultant notices the funding announcement manually, the quiet window it opened is often already closing.
How boilr handles it
Your AI sales employee watches for trigger events across more than 10,000 sources around the clock, matched against your ICP before anything reaches you. When one fires on an account that fits, it is logged as a dated, sourced entry against that company, not a vague note that "something happened", and boilr identifies the right decision-maker and drafts a task that names the exact event: what happened, when, and why it is a reason to reach out now. You review and send, you do not go looking for the event yourself.
Because every trigger event is kept in the Company Brain, patterns across an account build up over time instead of resetting with every consultant who touches it: a funding round followed by a leadership hire followed by an office expansion tells a much stronger story than any single event on its own. That history survives consultant turnover and staff changes, so the next person working the account inherits the full picture rather than starting from a blank page.
