Congrats On The Trigger

A buying signal plus a short, non-salesy DM beats another cold sequence.

Most outbound starts with a list and a pitch. The better starting point is a public event that means the account is about to spend: a raise, a hire, a launch, a talk. Google already emails those events if you ask it to. Once a week you turn the digest into ten short LinkedIn notes that congratulate the person and mention why you are relevant, then you stop talking. The pitch happens after they look you up.

What to do: Set one Google Alert on the trigger your buyer actually has money after. Batch the digest to Friday. Send 10 to 12 LinkedIn DMs that week, each one about their news, with one line of proof you belong in the conversation. No deck. No "quick call?"

Why it works: You are arriving at the moment they are allowed to buy, and the message does not ask them for anything. Curiosity does the rest.

Example: Justin Welsh used this to land healthcare consulting clients after ZocDoc and PatientPop. He published the system as Issue #125 of The Saturday Essay on May 25, 2024. The essay is still on his site. The alert was "healthcare" OR "doctor" plus "series A". The DM congratulated the raise and named his background. His own math in that essay: 10 to 12 messages every Friday, and even a 10% reply rate at a $25,000 average deal would have been $1.25M of annual pipeline from fifteen minutes a week. He says he usually beat 10%.

Walk it through

I pulled the essay from justinwelsh.me in September 2026 so the steps come from him, not from a thread summarizing him.

1. Get the system from the source.

The opening is the constraint: how to attract ideal clients without coming on too strong. The method is Google Alerts plus LinkedIn DMs, and he says it works best if you already publish, because the profile has to finish the sentence the DM starts.

2. Copy the template that is still on the page.

The note is three facts. I saw your news. I have a relevant past. I am a person in a city. No ask.

"Congrats on the recent round, . I'm a healthcare technology veteran (ZocDoc/PatientPop) and love what you're doing. Following you all from way over here in Los Angeles."

Your trigger is whatever public event means your buyer now has budget: a fundraise, a "we're hiring" for the role you replace, a conference talk, a Forbes feature. One or two phrases in the Alert. Not twenty. He ran 10 to 12 notes every Friday. Calendar block, not "when I remember."

3. Keep his published conversion math in the right bucket.

The $1.25M line, in the same section of the essay, is a what-if at 10% replies and a $25,000 average deal. He says he usually beat 10%. A December 2021 LinkedIn post of his, still public, gets more specific on an earlier version of the same motion: 75% of connection requests accepted, 19% of acceptances asked for a call, about 35% of those conversations became business, "every 15 emails I send lands a new client." That post is four years older than the essay. Use the essay for the method. Treat the conversion stack as his experience, not a benchmark you inherit.

The read

• The trigger is the list. You are not buying contacts. You are waiting for the world to tell you who just became in-market.
• The DM is bait for the profile. If the LinkedIn page does not prove the one-line claim, the trick is just another cold message.
• Friday is the send. The assistant can draft the notes from the digest. It does not get the account. A tool that drips all week sounds like a tool.

Steal it

Write the one trigger that means your buyer is about to spend, and make the Alert. On Friday, have the assistant turn the digest into ten notes from your template, each one about their news and your one line of proof. You read them. You send them. An agent that DMs for you is how this becomes spam, and LinkedIn will treat it that way. Count replies for a month before you change a word.

This pairs with Pretarget Before You Pitch if you later want ads to warm the same list, and with Follow Champions to New Jobs if the trigger is a job change instead of a raise. Do not run all three in the same week on the same person.

Gotchas

• A raise is not a purchase order. Some Series A teams freeze consulting spend. The trigger is necessary, not sufficient.
• LinkedIn will throttle a new account that suddenly DMs twelve strangers. Publish for a few weeks first, the way Welsh says, or the notes never land.
• Do not paste his healthcare template into fintech. The only reason his line worked is that ZocDoc and PatientPop were the right logos for that buyer. Your one line has to pass the same test.