A deep read of Shift Selling: Turn Your Prospects into Customers (45:45) on Badger Maps's Outside Sales Talk podcast, hosted by Steve Benson. Craig Elias is the creator of Trigger Event Selling and co-author of SHiFT! Harness the Trigger Events That Turn Prospects into Customers.
Why this analysis exists
This is one of the source layers behind the BuildOS cold-email-icp-signal-design child skill. It supplies the trigger taxonomy and "first-in" thesis — what counts as a buying moment, why prospects need three events to actually transact, and how to monitor systematically for those moments instead of guessing.
Core thesis
"It's the ability to say the right things to the right people at the right time. If you're not in front of somebody at the right time, it is really hard to change somebody's mind."
Most outreach fails because the salesperson called the right prospect at the wrong moment. The prospect was happy with their current solution, said "I'm not interested," and went into a six-month silence. Then something shifted in their world — and they bought from whoever happened to call them that week.
The shift is the only thing that matters. Cold outreach without trigger thinking is a lottery.
The A/B/C Trigger Taxonomy
Elias divides triggering events into three families. Every one of them is observable from outside the prospect's company.
A — Awareness
The default mode of most cold outreach. "Hi, I'm calling because we're better, faster, cheaper."
"We pick up the phone, we call somebody, we say we're better faster cheaper. Now doesn't work very often."
Awareness is the weakest trigger because the prospect has no internal reason to listen. It only works when stacked with B or C.
B — Bad experience with the existing solution
The prospect's current vendor broke their promise. This is the strongest internal trigger because the prospect is already mentally shopping.
Bad experiences are usually caused by changes in the incumbent vendor:
- Salesperson change at the incumbent. Elias cites data that a change in the incumbent's salesperson triggers 28–33% of all vendor changes. Their rep leaves, the relationship dies, the account becomes shoppable.
- Product change. End-of-life, deprecation, a feature regression.
- Reputation change. A lawsuit, a merger, a public failure. ("Boeing right now has that problem.")
The implication for outreach: a competitor's new-hire announcement is one of the highest-value signals in the market. So is a public incident.
C — Change inside the prospect's organization
Elias's favorite category because changes are predictable and publicly observable.
- Change in the decision maker. Someone new in a role. This is the highest-leverage C trigger.
- Change in location. Opening a new office, entering a new region, hitting a regulatory boundary.
- Change in priorities. A competitor announces something the prospect has to respond to.
"My big one is a change in decision maker. I love a change in decision makers. There's a book out called the Challenger Sale… they talk about mobilizers. It just turns out that a mobilizer is created when somebody's new in their job."
This is the cleanest hookup from Elias to Brent Adamson: new hires are statistically more likely to be Mobilizers, because they have a mandate to change something and a clean record to defend.
The three-event rule (why most trigger campaigns still fail)
A single trigger is not enough. Elias's full model says a buyer needs three events before they transact:
- Event 1 — They want to change. (Bad experience, awareness, or change.)
- Event 2 — They can change. Budget shows up, time opens, a project gets approved.
- Event 3 — They can justify the change. Internal political cover, a clean business case.
A prospect with only Event 1 is "in the window of dissatisfaction" — interested but inert. The vendor who shows up between Event 1 and Event 2 has the best odds of being chosen when Event 2 arrives.
This is why so many trigger-data tools disappoint. They surface Event 1 (new hire, funding round, exec change) and the rep expects an immediate buying conversation. The right play is to use Event 1 as the cold outreach entry point and then help the prospect reach Event 2 by building the case.
The "first-in" advantage — 75%
"As soon as you give me permission to reframe your problem, that's when I win the battle… I am 75% likely to win that piece of business."
The data point Elias keeps citing: when the vendor is first in — before the buyer has finished defining the problem — they win roughly 74–75% of the time. The reason is structural. The first vendor to talk to the buyer shapes the evaluation criteria. Every later vendor is graded against the first vendor's framing.
This is the underlying argument for monitoring trigger events at all. The reward for being first isn't a small edge. It's a 3x win rate.
How to monitor for triggers (practical surfaces)
Elias names six observable surfaces:
| Surface | Trigger it reveals |
|---|---|
| Email bounces or "left the company" auto-replies | Decision-maker change (C trigger) |
| LinkedIn job-change notifications | New hire = Mobilizer + 30–60 day budget window |
| LinkedIn saved searches ("VP of Sales" filter, "new in role") | Steady stream of C triggers in your ICP |
| Google Alerts ("appointed VP Sales", "appointed CMO") | C triggers via press releases |
| Job postings on Indeed | Two signals: open role + the previous holder just moved (often to a target account) |
| The prospect themselves ("call me in six months") | They are telling you they are in the window |
"When someone says to us, 'I'm thinking of changing, why don't you phone me back in six months,' if anybody says something to you like that, what does that tell you? It tells you they're thinking of changing and now's the time to have that conversation."
The 21-day patience pattern (handling "call me later")
When a prospect signals they are in the window but pushes scheduling, Elias's pattern is to compress the time commitment until they say yes:
- "Can I get 30 minutes next week?" → no.
- "What about two weeks from now?" → no.
- "What if I made it 20 minutes, three weeks out?" → yes.
"Most people won't say no to you three times in a row."
The point isn't the script — it's that the prospect already gave you the trigger. Don't let calendar friction lose the moment.
The "one job change fits four opportunities" rule
Elias's lightning-round answer worth pinning:
"One job change fits four opportunities, not one."
When a decision-maker moves, four trigger events fire simultaneously:
- The destination company — new exec with budget and a mandate.
- The origin company — backfill role open, incumbent relationships up for grabs.
- The vendors of the destination company — their relationship just got reset.
- The vendors of the origin company — their champion just left.
A single job change announcement should drive outreach to all four targets, not just the new hire.
What this contributes to the BuildOS ICP and Signal Design child skill
- Trigger taxonomy. A/B/C maps cleanly onto Ash Maurya's switching-trigger types (bad experience, change in circumstance, awareness event) but adds the observability layer — where you find the trigger from outside the company.
- Three-event model. The skill's "Why now?" check should not stop at Event 1. The rubric should ask whether Events 2 and 3 are reachable or whether the cold touch is purely an Event 1 entry point.
- The 33% / 75% data anchors. Two citable numbers for the skill's source-backed guardrails: a salesperson-change at the incumbent drives roughly a third of all vendor changes, and the first-in vendor wins three out of four times.
- Monitoring surfaces. Six concrete trigger-discovery channels usable without any intent-data tool: LinkedIn saved searches, Google Alerts, job postings, "left the company" bounces, prospect self-disclosure, and competitor announcements.
- Mobilizer hookup. Elias's "new in role = Mobilizer" claim is the bridge between trigger theory and the buying-committee map. The skill's stakeholder template should flag tenure as a signal of mobilizer probability.
Caveats
- 2019 podcast, 45 minutes. Most numbers are from Elias's own research and book. Treat the 33% / 28% / 75% statistics as practitioner-grade evidence (Level 4), not academic-grade (Level 5).
- Field-sales bias. The interview is hosted by Badger Maps and tilts toward outside sales. The trigger taxonomy ports to email outreach cleanly; the relationship-credibility playbook (mountain biking trips, Whistler stories) does not.
- Win-rate framing. The 75% number is for the first vendor to fully reframe the problem with the buyer — not the first vendor to send an email. The cold email is the entry point; the reframe happens in the first conversation.
Source
- Transcript:
2026-05-15-craig-elias-shift-selling-trigger-events.md(in-repo) - Video: Shift Selling: Turn Your Prospects into Customers (Badger Maps, 2019-07-18, 45:45)
- Book: SHiFT! Harness the Trigger Events That Turn Prospects into Customers — Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto. Free PDF at shiftselling.com/book/friends.
- Speaker site: shiftselling.com