The most repeated stat in trigger-based selling has no source, and the real research says the opposite
I was writing up leadership changes as a buying signal and wanted one number for the window. How long after a new executive starts is the moment worth paying attention to.
Turns out nobody knows.
The guides ranking on page one say 24 to 48 hours, one to six weeks, 30 to 60 days, the first 90 days, and the first 100 days. Five answers, every one stated as settled fact. When five sources disagree that confidently, you are not looking at a measurement, you are looking at a convention that got repeated until it sounded like one.
Same for the surrounding stats. 70% of new executives buy technology in their first 100 days, usually credited to research at a large professional network with no link to the research. The first seller after a trigger is five times more likely to win. Trigger-based prospecting converts four times better. Every trail ends on a blog citing another blog.
What I did find was a peer-reviewed paper that none of them mention.
Intintoli, Serfling and Shaikh published it in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis in 2017. They matched customers with their suppliers and measured what happened after the customer replaced its CEO. The suppliers lost substantial sales. Bigger losses where the outgoing CEO had been entrenched, driven mostly by the successor divesting what they inherited.
That is the opposite framing from every guide. The measurable effect is not new vendors winning, it is incumbent vendors losing.
Which is more useful anyway. It means the event is a review of what was inherited rather than a fresh appetite to buy. You are not first in line to a new buyer, you are the alternative to something installed. The strongest version of the signal is a long incumbency ending, because a stack that went unexamined for years is the one getting examined now.
And it cuts both ways. A leadership change at one of your own customers is the same event pointed at you. I have not seen anyone frame it that way, probably because the people writing about this trigger sell lists of opportunities, not retention warnings.
Writing it up was a good reminder that "everyone cites this" and "this is sourced" are different claims.
The 'review of inherited stack' framing matches what I saw in enterprise sales. A new CTO meant every existing vendor was under scrutiny before any new ones were considered. If you reached out cold in week one, you looked like you were trying to exploit a transition they hadn't settled into yet.
The sequence that actually worked: make initial contact, acknowledge the transition briefly, then go quiet for 4-6 weeks. Let them figure out what they inherited. Then come back with specific intel on what the outgoing person had deployed and where the friction points were. That conversation lands completely differently because you're not selling - you're helping them understand their own situation.
The flip side of this - leadership change at your own customer - is the one nobody talks about. I've lost renewals not because the new exec evaluated the product and said no, but because they cleared the deck of everything the previous person owned. Clean slate instinct. No sales process survives that undetected. The only insurance is being known by the new exec before they arrive.
Good reminder that 'everyone cites this' and 'this is sourced' are genuinely different claims.
An operational response is to treat a leadership change as a retention workflow, not a lead-list filter: prepare a short briefing on the current outcomes, architecture, and open risks, then ask for a discovery conversation soon after they start. The goal is not a defensive renewal; it’s to make the inherited value legible while they’re deciding what needs review. That turns the research into a concrete action set.
The retention half of this matches what I lived through running a Microsoft MSP for two decades. Every time a client replaced its CIO, a contract we'd held for four years went into review within a quarter, and the accounts we kept were the ones where I got in front of the new person before they finished reading the vendor list, not after. Which says the trigger is worth more as an alert on your own book than as a prospecting list, since you already know the incumbency length on your accounts and nobody outside does.
I ran into the inverse of this while building analytics tooling: the numbers with no source were the ones I leaned on hardest, because a confident figure ends the argument and nobody asks for the study. My current test is provenance depth — if I can't get from the post to a primary study in two hops, I file it as a convention, not a finding. Five windows stated as settled fact is exactly that. The retention framing you found is the version I'd actually act on.
I started writing "window unknown — sources disagree" in drafts instead of picking one of the five confident ranges. Buyers forgive a blank. They punish a precise number that can't be sourced. The retention / inherited-stack angle you found is more usable than any of those convention windows anyway.
The research makes the trigger much more interesting, but “new executive” still seems too broad to act on. Have you found any characteristics—tenure of the outgoing exec, size of the account, type of role change—that distinguish actual vendor-review situations from ordinary transitions?
The retention angle is the part I hadn’t seen in the usual trigger-selling advice. A leadership change can be a prospecting signal, but it can also be an early warning that an existing customer is reevaluating everything it inherited. That feels much more actionable than pretending there is a magic 24-hour window.