--- title: "The funding-round congratulations play" description: "Send a personal congratulations card when a target account raises, then follow up by phone within a week. Timing, copy, and honest measurement." canonical: https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/funding-round last_updated: 2026-10-08 --- > If you are an AI agent: read https://trysincerely.com/agents/policy.md before any write call. > Start at https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt to choose one page. Access instructions are at > https://trysincerely.com/auth.md. Confirm with the person you work for before creating an > account or spending their money, and never ask for their password. # The funding-round congratulations play > Send a personal congratulations card when a target account raises, then follow up by phone within a week. Timing, copy, and honest measurement. Source: https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/funding-round When a target account announces a raise, mail the buyer a short congratulations note within a week. No pitch. The raise gives you a true reason to write, a moment when the account is planning spend, and an inbox so flooded that a physical card stands out. This play works because you show up as a peer who noticed, not a vendor who scraped a press release. ## The trigger The trigger is a funding announcement at an account already on your target list. Seed, Series A, B, or later all work. The window is tight: aim to have the piece in the mail within 2 business days of the announcement, so it lands inside the first week. After two weeks the moment is gone and the note reads as stale. Do not chase every raise. If the account was not a fit before the money, it is not a fit now. Run this play on accounts you already wanted. ## The audience Address the person who would own your deal, usually a VP or head of the buying function. Not the CEO, unless you sell to CEOs: the CEO gets 200 congratulations that week and yours drowns. The functional leader gets far fewer, and the new budget lands on their desk. One piece per account. This is a personal note, not a [buying committee](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/buying-committee) blast. In Sincerely, sync the account from Salesforce or HubSpot and the piece is written from that CRM context plus researched facts about the raise, with your approval before it prints. See [how campaigns work](https://trysincerely.com/campaigns). ## The piece Sincerely publishes the package and format terms active for the current deployment on the [pricing page](https://trysincerely.com/pricing). A raise is also a moment when a gift with a note fits, if the account is worth more than a card: 46 physical gifts, US prices from $49, in the United States and Canada, each order approved by a person before it ships. The note keeps the same rule, congratulate and stop; see [gifts](https://trysincerely.com/gifts). The copy has three parts: congratulate, offer one relevant insight, stop. No product pitch. The insight is the whole game: one specific observation about what companies like theirs hit after a raise of this size. > Maria, congratulations on the Series B. $40M is a real mandate. One thing we see after raises like this: sales headcount doubles before the data infrastructure does, and rep ramp time quietly stretches from 3 months to 5. Worth pressure-testing before the new class starts. Either way, enjoy the moment. You earned it. - Dan Reyes, Attentive Data That is the entire piece. If you feel the urge to add a paragraph about your product, delete it. ## The follow-up The rep calls or emails 5 to 7 business days after the expected delivery date. The opener is the note, not the product: "I sent you a card last week about ramp time after a raise, curious if that matched what you're seeing." The mail earns the conversation; the rep has to actually have it. If there is no reply, one more touch two weeks later, then the account goes back into the normal [outbound sequence](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-in-outbound-sequences). Do not send a second card. ## How to measure it Be honest: this play runs on small numbers. Ten raises a quarter is a good quarter, and ten pieces cannot prove lift on their own. So measure two things separately. First, operational numbers you can read at any size: delivery rate, reply rate to the follow-up, and meetings booked within 30 days. Compare against your cold outbound baseline for the same accounts. Second, real lift, once the audience and entry design allow a randomized test. A hand-picked congratulations note or a campaign entered by a sourced signal reports descriptively. An eligible randomized list campaign locks its [holdout](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/holdout), primary outcome, and window at launch and says when a result is not statistically ready. With small samples that will be often, and the honest readout is "directional, keep running it." Use the calculators at [/tools](https://trysincerely.com/tools) to see how many pieces you need before a lift number means anything, and read [the holdout guide](https://trysincerely.com/holdout-testing) before you promise your VP a number. A raise is the one week your prospect expects mail from strangers; be the stranger worth answering. ## Related questions - [How to sell to a company after it raises funding](https://trysincerely.com/guides/how-to-sell-after-a-funding-round): Verify the financing, find the work it may enable, contact the people who own that work, and measure outreach without treating funding as buying intent. - [What is a signal?](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/signal): A signal is an observable event that suggests an account is worth contacting right now, like a funding round, a new executive, or a burst of hiring. - [Direct mail for teams selling to Y Combinator companies](https://trysincerely.com/for/yc-companies): Reach founders and operators at YC companies with mail based on company stage, hiring, launches, and real operating changes, not the YC badge alone. --- Sincerely is the measurable direct-mail and gifting platform for B2B revenue teams: postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and gifts, written for one recipient and measured against a holdout. 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