Tags: hacks tweaks

In our post last week, we shared a few LinkedIn workarounds that help you, the sales development rep (SDR), speed up your prospecting efforts. Now that you can find the full name of any person on LinkedIn, it’s time to create a streamlined process for deciphering their email address.

Disclaimer: To set expectations, we should be clear that finding emails with free tools is not an exact science. The process outlined below will work on many occasions, but it will take time, effort and a little bit of luck to really get the hang of it. Likewise, there are always going to be email addresses that you’re just not going to find with free tools, so don’t get bogged down on a particular prospect — it’s best to just move on.

Admittedly, this rarely works anymore as executives are becoming more adept at social media… but it’s always good to check. Look for your prospect’s contact information on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and search for any blogs or websites that they may have.

Step 2: Finding the company domain

If step 1 doesn’t pan out, it’s time to create a more in depth strategy. Let’s begin by finding the domain of your prospect’s company. The domain is everything that comes after ‘@’ — for example, the email ‘john@gmail.com’ has the domain ‘gmail.com’. This bit should be fairly easy to find, but just in case you’re having trouble, here’s what we recommend.

Use the company website

In almost every case, you can find the company domain on the company’s corporate website (for this example, I chose Walmart). Note the term ‘corporate’ here — many times, with companies that own a number of subsidiary brands, the executive team will have email addresses associated with the domain of the corporate entity and not one of the brands. This in mind, the best place to look for domain name information is the corporate website.

Once you’ve found the right site, a good place to start is the ‘Contact us’ page — typically a company will have a contact@domain.com email address set up for inquiries, where the domain name mirrors the structure of all employee emails. In addition to the Contact us page, you can also find domain information on pages like ‘Careers’, ‘Investors’, ‘Press’ and ‘Events’.

Step 3: Finding the user name

The user name refers to everything that comes before ‘@’ in an email address. As an SDR, you’ll need be able to find user names quickly, which can be a huge challenge if you don’t have a good system or solution in place. We recommend breaking this process up into two steps: first, find the user name structure of your prospect’s company, then verify that this structure is accurate for your prospect’s unique email address.

Using Google ‘Fill in the blank’ search to find user name structure

Google has a number of custom search tokens, called ‘search operators’, that allow you to get a bit more precise with your searches. A well-known search operator example is ‘exact word or phrase match’ — by placing quotes around a search phrase, Google knows to show all results that include the exact content of your particular phrase.

To find user name structures, try using the ‘fill in the blank’ search operator. In this case, your search query will be *@domain.com, which will display all results that end with ‘@domain.com’. If you dig through the results a bit (yes, you may have to go to page 2 or even page 3…) you should stumble upon the email address of an employee at your prospect’s company, which will give you the user name structure for your prospect.

Wrapping things up with Rapportive

If you aren’t using Rapportive to verify email addresses, you’re not doing it right. Once you’ve found the domain and user name structure, it’s time to verify that your prospect’s email follows the same framework. In Gmail, compose a new message and type in your prospect’s inferred email address. If one or more of your prospect’s social networks pop up on the side panel, congrats! The email you entered is valid.

Find emails in seconds with the Datanyze Email Finder

As mentioned in the above, using free tools to find emails is far from foolproof, and it’s likely that you’ll encounter a number of roadblocks along the way. The above steps will get you there some of the time, but if you’re searching for a faster and more accurate tool, we suggest you check our own Email Finder. To see it in action, feel free to get in touch.

What are some best practices that you’ve come across for finding emails? Feel free to share your tips in the comments section below.

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