Job change, published post, same conference: the triggers worth watching

The reason to write was in your notifications

The best reason to email someone you met eight months ago almost never comes from your calendar.

Picture the version that works. A partnerships lead you met at a fintech conference in the spring has just moved to a new company. Their announcement post is two days old. You remember they spent most of that hallway conversation complaining about how slowly their old employer signed vendors. So you write three lines: congratulations, a nod to that conversation, and a question about what they're building first. They answer the same afternoon.

Now the version most people actually send. A CRM task fires because it's been 90 days. You open a blank draft, stare at it, and type "Hope you're well, just wanted to check in." It sits unanswered.

Nobody did anything wrong. The second email simply had no reason to exist in the recipient's week.

When should you reach out to a professional contact?

When something changes on their side. That's the rule, and the short version is write on their clock.

Calendar-triggered outreach runs on your schedule: a quarterly reminder, a pipeline review, a slow week. Event-triggered outreach runs on theirs: a new title, a product launch, a talk they're about to give. The recipient can tell which one they got from the first sentence. One email is about a box you needed to tick. The other is about something they care about right now, and it gives them a specific thing to reply to.

Small events count. A two-paragraph post they wrote on a Tuesday is enough. The message has to point at their moment, and you have to be able to tie that moment to something real from when you met.

Why 'touch base every 90 days' keeps failing

Fixed-interval advice is popular because it's easy to automate. Pick a number, set a recurring task, feel organized. Sales forums like r/sales keep circling the same question: how often is too often?

Frequency is the wrong thing to tune. A reminder that fires on day 90 knows nothing about day 90 in that person's life. It might land the week they're buried in a launch, or the week after they've left the company. So the email defaults to a generic check-in, because there's nothing specific to say.

And the cost compounds. Every touch with nothing in it teaches the recipient that your name in their inbox means nothing to act on. By the third one, they've stopped opening.

Schedules still have one honest use. Treat the reminder as a prompt to go look for a trigger, and send nothing if you don't find one.

Good reasons to reconnect with someone professionally: six triggers

These six come up most reliably across a working network. Each one gives you a natural first line, and each one can go wrong in its own way.

The pattern underneath is the same every time. Name the trigger, connect it to one detail from your last real conversation, then ask one question that's easy to answer. Three lines usually does it. If you can't find the detail, the trigger alone will produce the same note everyone else sends.

What a Monday morning of triggers looks like

Take a hypothetical independent consultant with roughly 240 contacts from a year of events and client work. An honest scan of that list in a given week could turn up a handful of real triggers. One contact changed jobs. Another published a long post about a vendor-selection problem. Two are listed as speakers at a conference the consultant is already attending next month. A former client's company announced an acquisition.

That's five strong emails, each with an obvious first line. The other 235 contacts get nothing that week, and that's correct.

The scan is the catch. Doing it by hand means opening 240 profiles, company pages and event agendas every week, and remembering what you talked about with each person. People keep it up for their top ten and let everyone else go quiet. But the long tail is where the opportunities sit: the person you met once, liked, and never had a reason to write to.

This is where manual tracking breaks. Past a few dozen people, catching triggers becomes a watching problem, and watching at that scale is a system's job.

The bottleneck moves from writing to noticing

If triggers drive good outreach, the hard part of follow-up moves. Writing a three-line congratulations note takes two minutes. What fails is spotting the job change in time and tying it to a conversation from eight months ago.

The second half matters more than it looks. A trigger without context produces the note everyone else sends, and "Congrats on the new role!" disappears among forty identical comments. Add one remembered detail, like the vendor headache they mentioned or the city they were moving to, and you've written a note nobody else could have.

So the work changes. Capture the context at the first meeting while it's fresh, then let something else watch for the moment it becomes useful. The 72-Hour Memory Cliff covers the capture side. This is the other end of the same chain.

A trigger tells you when to write. The context from the first meeting tells you what to say.

Where Met fits

Met is built for the capture half of this, and for keeping it attached to the person. Event Mode lets you log people, plus the details that matter, while you're still in the room. The note about their vendor problem or their move doesn't evaporate by Friday. That context stays with the contact in your own iCloud storage, with no ads and no data sold.

Later, when a reason to reach out comes up, Met puts it next to what you captured at the first meeting. The follow-up draft starts from what you actually talked about, not from a blank page.

You still decide who's worth writing to. Met makes sure that when a reason turns up, you still have something specific to say.