Reach Them at the New Company
Outcome: a verified work address at the new employer for each qualified mover, and a message shaped by which population they came from.
- Surface
- App and MCP server
- Level
- Intermediate
- Uses
- find_work_email · verify_email
- Credits
- ~1.3 per moved champion
- Prerequisite
- Lesson 05's qualified movers
Enrich against the new domain
Obvious and easy to get wrong. The old address is dead; the lookup must use the new company’s domain plus their name, or the LinkedIn profile URL.
Two practical notes:
- Hit rates on very recent movers are slightly lower — some providers lag the change by a few weeks, the same lag as detection.
- Where the work email misses, the LinkedIn message is a legitimate fallback here in a way it is not for cold outreach. You have a real prior relationship.
Verify before sending, exactly as in Waterfall Enrichment lesson 03.
The congratulations note
Week one, no ask, nothing attached.
“Saw you’ve joined Acme — congratulations. Hope the first weeks are going well.”
That is the entire message. No product, no meeting request, no “would love to catch up about how we could help”.
The people who reply to this note are your warmest subset, and the reply is what opens the real conversation. Sending it costs nothing and it is the single highest-leverage message in this course — but only if there is genuinely nothing attached to it.
Three message shapes
The real message lands in week three, and it differs by population.
Past customer
They used the product and know it works. The message is about their new context, not about the product.
“You ran [product] at [old company] — curious whether Acme has anything in place for [problem], or whether that is on your list.”
Direct, assumes shared context, no re-explanation.
Blocked champion
They wanted it and something got in the way. Reference the circumstance lightly, never the loss.
“Timing was the issue at [old company]. Different company, different constraints — worth a look now?”
Do not say “you tried to buy from us and failed”. Do not mention the internal politics you know about.
Past evaluator
They know the category, not necessarily you. Lead with the category, not the relationship.
“We spoke when you were evaluating [category] at [old company]. Most people in a new [role] seat end up revisiting that in the first quarter.”
What not to do
| Do not | Why |
|---|---|
| Pitch in week one | They have no authority yet and it reads as monitoring |
| Reference internal details from the old deal | You know things they may not want known |
| Send the same message to all three populations | The relationships are genuinely different |
| Use “I noticed you joined” | The phrase every automated congratulations uses |
| Attach a calendar link to the congratulations note | It converts the note into a pretext |
The failure that costs the relationship permanently is a templated “I saw you joined Acme — 15 minutes to discuss our platform?” in someone’s first week. It tells the warmest lead in your database that they are on a monitored list, and there is no recovering the relationship afterwards. The congratulations note and the pitch must be different messages, weeks apart.
Do this now
Enrich against the new domain
Name plus new domain, or the profile URL.
Verify
Valid only.
Route work-email misses to LinkedIn
Legitimate here, given the prior relationship.
Send the congratulations note in week one
Nothing attached.
Build three message variants
One per population.
Schedule the real message for week three
Track replies to the note separately
They are your warmest subset and deserve a human, not a sequence.
Check your work
- Enrichment used the new domain, not the old one
- Every address is verified
- The congratulations note has no ask attached
- Three distinct message variants exist
- The real message is scheduled for week three, not week one
Where this breaks
Referencing details from the old opportunity that the person did not share with you — the internal objection, who blocked it, what the budget was — makes the message feel like surveillance rather than memory. Keep the reference to the fact of the relationship and the general circumstance. “Timing was the issue” is fine; naming their former CFO is not.
Further automation
Write the move back to the CRM: a champion_moved flag with the old and new company on the contact record. Account owners then see the context without anyone having to explain the pipeline, and the same record supports the internal-introduction play from lesson 05.
Next lesson
07 — Run it weekly, turning all of this into a standing tracker.
Reference for this lesson: find_work_email, verify_email, Waterfall Enrichment, Outreach integrations.