Stop Doing Cold Outreach. Do This Instead.

Lucas Siegel has to sell to HR leaders.

If you’ve ever done B2B sales, you know how hard that is. HR gets buried in vendor pitches. Response rates are terrible. Even the “good” cold emails get ignored.

So Lucas — who runs Yuna, an AI mental health platform doing $30M valuation with 50K users across 155 countries — stopped trying to get HR’s attention when they had no reason to care.

Instead, he built something that waits.

The System

Yuna’s agents monitor news feeds for workplace suicides. The second an incident gets reported, the system identifies the company, finds the head of HR, and drafts a personalized outreach email — something like: “We heard about what happened at [company]. Our platform helps HR teams support employees through this. Here’s what we do.”

That email goes out within hours of the news breaking.

Same playbook with Glassdoor. If a company’s reviews start filling up with “burnout,” “toxic management,” “nobody cares about employee wellbeing” — that’s a signal. The agent sees it, flags it, and fires an outreach to HR.

Lucas told me: “There are hundreds and hundreds of these events per day. And when something like that happens, if you’re the head of HR, you’re in pain. You’re looking for a solution. That is the perfect time to reach out.”

Why This Is Different

Traditional cold outreach assumes you can find the right person and make them care right now.

That’s hard. Most of the time, the timing is just wrong. The person you’re emailing doesn’t have a burning problem. They have a vague interest at best. You’re an interruption.

Trigger outreach inverts this completely. You don’t try to create interest — you monitor for it. You’re not interrupting anyone. You’re arriving at the exact moment they have a problem you solve.

The personalization isn’t “I saw you went to Stanford.” It’s “I know what happened at your company yesterday.”

That’s a different conversation.

The Pattern Shows Up Everywhere

I saw the same logic work with a technical trader I help. He was spending three hours every morning scanning charts manually, looking for specific pattern setups before the market opened. It was exhausting and he could only cover so many charts.

We built an agent that monitors his entire watchlist all day. When a pattern matches his criteria, it sends him an alert with the top five candidates to look at. He went from three hours of manual searching to reviewing a shortlist.

Same principle. Don’t search for the signal continuously. Define what you’re looking for, set the watch, and act when it fires.

For Yuna, the “signal” is a company in visible mental health crisis. For the trader, it’s a chart pattern. In both cases, the agent is doing the watching — the human only shows up when conditions are right.

How to Apply This to Your Business

Not every business has a clear “distress signal” the way Yuna does. But most have something.

Ask: what’s the event that means my ideal buyer is probably already looking for help right now?

A few examples:

• Recruiting firms: monitor for layoff announcements — companies about to flood the market with suddenly-available talent, or companies who just let go of key roles they’ll need to backfill
• Cybersecurity companies: monitor for data breach news — CISOs at peer companies who are suddenly having a board-level conversation about their own vulnerabilities
• Financial advisors: monitor for acquisition news — executives who just had a liquidity event and need to figure out what to do with it
• HR software: monitor for NLRB filings or union organizing news — companies suddenly very focused on employee relations

In each case, the trigger event is public information. You could theoretically track these manually. But at scale? You can’t. An agent can.

Setting It Up

The basic architecture is simple: a monitoring layer (news API, Glassdoor scraper, SEC filings, job board changes, whatever fits your signal) feeds into a research layer (find the right contact at the triggered company), which feeds into a drafting layer (write a personalized outreach message using what you know about the trigger event).

The tools Lindy, n8n, or a custom agent setup can handle this. The harder part is defining your signal clearly enough that the system fires on real buying moments, not noise.

That’s the work worth doing. Because once you have it running, you’re no longer competing with everyone else sending cold emails into a void.

You’re the only one showing up when it actually matters.

Thanh Pham is the founder of Asian Efficiency. He works with business owners to identify where AI can do the watching so humans can do the deciding.