The short answer
- You want the person who feels the problem you solve - not the most senior title on the page.
- The company's own pages beat every database: the team page, the about page, the blog bylines, the job ads (a job ad is a list of problems, signed by their owner).
- LinkedIn confirms the name and spelling; you do not need InMail to know who you are looking at.
- Guess the address format from one known address - first name, or first initial plus last name. Most companies use one pattern for everyone.
- Stop after finding one right person. A list of twenty names is a spreadsheet; one name and one honest sentence is outreach.
Where the name actually is
- Check the team or about page first. Small companies put everyone there with faces and titles.
- Read the blog or news page: the person writing about the topic you help with is often the person who owns it.
- Read their job ads. An ad for a 'marketing coordinator' is a signed confession that marketing is overloaded - and the hiring manager's name is usually on the process.
- Search the company site for the department word plus 'email' or 'contact' - conference talks, podcasts and local press often name people your way.
- Verify the spelling and current role on LinkedIn before writing anything. A wrong title in line one wastes the whole email.
Writing the first email once you have the name
The email is shorter than the search. Reference one true, specific thing - a post they wrote, a job they posted, a product they shipped - and connect it to the outcome you provide in one sentence. Then a small, answerable ask: fifteen minutes, or a yes-or-no question about whether the problem is on their desk this quarter. The point of finding the right person is that you no longer need to shout - one relevant sentence to the right inbox outperforms a hundred generic ones to the wrong one.
- One true specific reference in line one - it proves you did the work of finding them.
- One sentence on the outcome, sized to their world, not your CV.
- One small ask. Big asks get postponed forever; small asks get calendar slots.
- No attachment, no paragraph about your company, no 'just checking in' later - a reply or a quiet no.
What not to do
- Buying scraped email lists - deliverability dies, and so does the reputation of everyone on the domain you send from.
- Emailing three people at the same company about the same thing - they compare notes in the hallway.
- Farming the CEO because the title feels closer to power - the CEO forwards to exactly the person you skipped.
- Spending a week on tooling before the first email goes out. Ten names found by hand beat a database you never write to.
The free tool for this
There is no calculator that answers this one honestly, so here is the free set: eight calculators for rates, quotes, invoices, splits, prices and fees. They run in the page and send nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
The Outreach Kit is this method as a file: the search steps, the three-email sequence, and the tracker that counts replies per hundred so you know your real rate instead of your feelings. Outreach Kit is $16. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
Is finding someone's work email creepy?
Work email is published for exactly this purpose - being reachable about work. What crosses the line is personal-channel outreach, fake familiarity, and pretending the contact is accidental. Be plainly, boringly honest about why you are writing.
What if I can only find info@?
Use it once, with a subject line that names the department and problem, and ask them to forward it: 'whoever owns invoicing at [company]' gets routed more often than you would expect. Then note the silence and move on.
How many people should I contact per company, ever?
One at a time. If they do not answer in a week or two, one different person with a different angle - never two at once, never the same person twice in a row.
Read next
How to follow up on a cold email without annoying anyone, How to tell whether your cold email is working, without guessing.