Step 1 - Create your list
To start, we'll need a list of employee names & company website domains. Here's the output we're looking for:
You can generate this list however you like, but LinkedIn has one of the most up to date and robust employment information databases.
Here are searched for "sales development representative" and got 750k results.
I went profile by profile and grabbed their first & last name as well as the website domain of their current company.
Step 2 - Generate email combinations
Next, we're going to make some educated guesses of potential email addresses. Fortunately for us, most email addresses fit into a common set of templates:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
If you're comfortable with google sheet formulas, you can generate these combinations yourself. If you're unsure, you can copy my template here.
Step 3 - Hover & verify
Now we're on to the final step, leveraging google contact enrichment to find the right email.
If you hover over a cell that contains an email address, you'll get one of 3 results.
If it's blue, it's not a valid email and you'll need to keep looking.
If it's any color other than the stock blue, it's a valid email.
If your target has added a profile picture to their google account, you'll see it here. Of course these are also valid emails.
As I go, I copy the valid emails and add them to a "validated email" column. Of course you won't find a valid email for every account. It's possible the LinkedIn data is outdated, the company has a unique setup for email domains not covered here, or they issued employee emails on a different domain than the primary website.
You may find that every once in a while you won't get a contact pop up when hovering over an email cell. When this happens, just click into a different tab and come back and you'll start getting the pop up again.
That's all for this tutorial. Of course, you can do this much faster through buying a list of emails on ZoomInfo or Apollo, but this is the best way to do it for free.
