A new leader from a company you served

A new CTO shows up at a target account. Their last job was at a company your firm did work for. That's not a cold account anymore.

They know your work's reputation from the inside. Or they can check it with one phone call to someone they trust.

Why this one beats a normal new leader

A new leader is already one of the strongest signals there is. They arrive with a mandate, a budget review, and a vendor list they didn't pick. I wrote about that in why a new CTO rewrites the vendor list.

Most of the firms calling them in their first 90 days are strangers. You aren't. Your firm shipped something at their old company. They either saw it, heard about it in a staff meeting, or sat two floors away from the team that ran it.

That changes the first question in their head. It's no longer "who are these people." It's "were they any good."

And you can answer that one with a name.

Find who overlapped

This is the part most firms skip.

Pull the dates. When did the new leader work at the old company, and in what group? When did your engagement run, and for which team? You want the months where both were in the building.

Then go to your delivery side. The engagement lead, the architects, the PM, the account manager. Ask each one if they knew this person, worked in meetings with them, or reported into their org. Delivery people forget to mention this stuff. They don't think of it as sales. I made the case in your delivery team knows more buyers than your sales team.

Sometimes the answer is a real relationship. Your lead architect sat in their weekly review for a year. That's a warm intro, and it should come from the architect.

Sometimes the answer is distance. The leader was in a different division and never touched your project. That's still useful. Their old peers know your work, and that's the reference call they'll make.

Where to find it

LinkedIn job changes are the obvious source. Company press releases announce senior hires. Public companies file an 8-K for some officer appointments. Trade press covers the bigger moves.

The work is the match. Keep a list of every client your firm has served in the last five years, with the groups you worked in. Check new senior hires at your target accounts against that list. A ten-minute check once a week finds these.

What makes it strong and what makes it noise

Strong is a direct overlap. Same years, same org, a project they'd recognize. Stronger still is a project that went well and that they had a hand in.

Weaker is the same company, different decade. If your engagement ended three years before they arrived, they've heard your name at most.

Noise is a 200,000-person company where you did a six-week assessment in one country. They'll never connect it.

And one warning. If the engagement went badly, they know that too. Find out from your delivery team before you write a word. A bad history is better addressed head-on than discovered in their reference call.

Who to write to and who should write

The new leader is the target. The CTO, the VP of Engineering, the chief data officer, whoever owns the budget your work comes out of.

The sender depends on the overlap. If someone on your delivery team knew them, that person writes or makes the intro. If nobody did, the seller writes, and the old engagement is the research hook.

Say Priya Raman joins Halvorsen Mutual as CTO. She spent four years at Brightwater Health, where your firm rebuilt the claims data platform. Your engagement lead remembers her from steering meetings. Here's the note your seller sends after the engagement lead gives a heads-up.

Congrats on the move to Halvorsen. Our team rebuilt the claims data platform at Brightwater during your time there, and Marcus Lee remembers your steering reviews. You're now inheriting a data estate you didn't design, with a board that expects a plan in your first few months. My guess is the hard part is the same one Brightwater had, pipelines nobody trusts feeding reports everybody uses. Is that close, or is Halvorsen's problem different?

The old engagement is the hook. The new seat is the trigger. The guess is specific enough to be wrong, and the last line lets her say so.

Timing and stacking

The first 90 days are the window. After that, the new leader has picked partners and moved on to execution.

Move in the first few weeks. Don't wait for a post about priorities.

Stack it with what the account is doing. A new CTO plus a cluster of data engineering posts means the plan is already being staffed. A new CTO plus a cost program means they were brought in to cut, and outside help is how they'll do it fast. If they followed a former colleague of theirs from the old company, see following your champion to a new company.

Your past work follows people when they change jobs. Track where they land, find who on your team knew them, and let that person open the door.