How to Find the Real Decision-Maker at a Company: One Rule, Three Searches and Two Free Filters

This post is the written companion to our video on the same topic. Every search from the video is below so you can copy it.

Right address, wrong person

A verified address is half the job. The email lands, and nothing happens, because it went to someone who can't say yes. They forward it with "not my area", or they don't. Picking whose address to find matters as much as finding it.

The rule: one level above the work

The buyer is usually the person who owns the budget for the problem you solve, and that is normally one level above the people doing the work.

An example. A company is hiring five sales development reps. The reps aren't the buyer. For most purchases the CEO isn't either. The VP or head of sales who will manage those reps is. If the CEO is interested, they forward your email down to that person anyway; writing to them directly skips a step.

Company size changes the answer

Company size	Best first contact	Second wave
1–20 people	Founder, owner, CEO	None; one or two people is plenty
20–200	Head or director of the function	The founder if no reply
200–2,000	Director or head of the team that owns the problem	VP of the function
2,000+	Manager or director who runs the team day to day	Director or VP, mentioning the first contact

At a company of under twenty, the founder is the buyer, the user and often the person reading info@. Go straight to them; our guide to finding a small business owner's email covers how. In the middle, it's the head or director of the function. At large companies executives receive more cold email and pass it down, so the manager or director who feels the problem day to day is more likely to reply, or to point you to the right person.

These are working rules from our guide to filtering a lead list by seniority, not measured figures. Adjust them to what you sell: a security product at a bank is not bought the way a scheduling tool at a dental practice is.

Search 1: the leadership and team pages

site:example.com (intitle:"leadership" OR intitle:"our team" OR intitle:"about us")

site: keeps you on the company's domain, and intitle: only returns pages with "leadership", "our team" or "about us" in the title. Read for two things: the name of the person who runs the function you sell to, and the exact title they use, because that's what you'll filter on later.

At small businesses that don't name the owner on the site, look at the about page, the footer copyright line, signed replies to reviews, or the state business registry. In many US states the Secretary of State business search lists the officers or members of an LLC or corporation. Check the role, though: a registered agent is often a filing service, not the owner.

Once you have a name, the company's address format usually comes from its own site; see how to find every email address on a website and company email patterns.

Search 2: job posts say who's in charge

"reporting to the head of" "Example Co"
site:example.com (inurl:careers OR inurl:jobs) "reporting to"

A job post is a public, dated sign that a team has a problem and a budget right now, and it often says who the new hire reports to. "Reporting to the Head of Growth" is your buyer, named by the company itself. Our guide to building a list from hiring signals goes deeper.

Two warnings. The post often lists a recruiter or careers@. Those inboxes are for applicants, and a pitch there gets ignored or reported. And job boards have their own terms, so read the post by hand on the company's own site where you can, and record the post date and URL.

The signal fades. A rough freshness rule:

Post age	What to do
Under 1 week	Email now
1–3 weeks	Email this week
3–6 weeks	Check the post is still open first
Older	Drop the hiring angle; treat them as an ordinary account

Mentioning a role that was filled a month ago makes the email look automated.

Search 3: who speaks for the company

"Example Co" ("head of" OR "director of" OR "VP") ("said" OR "speaker")
"Example Co" "head of" "said"

Press releases quote the person who owns a launch. Conference agendas list the head of a function with their title, and podcast episode pages do the same. These people are named, current and public, and what they said is a ready-made reason to write.

Search engines are loose with operators inside brackets, so if the first version returns noise, use the simpler second one. Google doesn't document intitle:, inurl: or OR on its help pages; they still worked when we wrote this. More in our guide to Google search operators.

And LinkedIn? Use it by hand, to confirm a name and current title, not to collect anything. Section 8.2 of LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits scraping and bots, and we don't teach ways around it. The legitimate routes are in find an email from a LinkedIn profile.

Department matters as much as level

"Director" isn't a target; "director of marketing" is. A finance director and an engineering director buy completely different things. Always pair the level with the department: "director or VP, in marketing" is a target. "Director" on its own is a crowd.

Filter a whole list by seniority

When you have a CSV with a job title column, from an event list, an old export or a client, the free job title seniority filter does this in your browser:

• Every row gets a level: owner or founder, C-level, VP, director or head, manager, senior individual contributor, individual contributor or intern, plus a department such as sales, marketing, engineering or finance.
• Owner, C-level, VP and director are ticked to start. Tick or untick levels, then download the kept rows and the rest as two files, with both columns added.
• It expands spellings like Sr., Mgr and SVP, and catches assistant titles such as "Executive Assistant to the CEO" before they match as C-level. "Partner Manager" is read as a manager, not a partner.

Its limits are honest ones. Rules can misread unusual titles ("Chief Happiness Officer" is C-level by its words), so scan the C-level rows before you send. And it can't tell a VP at a ten-person company from a VP at a ten-thousand-person one. That's your judgement.

If your titles are messy before you start, normalise job titles first.

Don't email the whole company

The mistake that comes right after filtering: twelve directors at one company, all loaded into the same sequence. Colleagues compare notes, and twelve copies of one email reads as a campaign. If that company's security gateway starts rejecting you, all twelve fail together.

The free limit contacts per company tool groups your list by email domain, keeps the top N per company, most senior first by job title, and sets the rest aside in a second file for a later wave, with a count of rows per domain.

How many? No mail provider publishes a limit, so these are working rules from our guide to how many people at one company to email:

Company size	People at once
Under 50	1–2
50–500	2–3
500–5,000	3
5,000+ with separate divisions	3 per division

Companies behind security gateways or on catch-all domains deserve a lower cap still.

Pick the first wave on purpose

Choose those two or three deliberately:

1. The owner of the problem: the person whose job your offer changes.
2. The budget holder: their manager, with a shorter, higher-level message.
3. An adjacent user: someone whose part of the work it touches, with a message about that part.

If two of them would get the same email, drop one. Wave two only goes out if wave one got no reply and no objection, after a gap of a couple of weeks. Any reply from anyone at the company pauses everyone else there.

If you filter out shared inboxes like info@ at larger companies, the role-based email filter flags them in your browser.

Verify after you filter

Filter first, then verify: there's no point checking the addresses of people you won't email. But do verify, because titles and addresses go stale together. When someone changes jobs, the old export still says "director", and the address at the old company often stops working (B2B contact data decay).

Upload the kept file on the verify page. The first 100 email checks are free with a Google sign-in, no card, and valid, risky and invalid come back as separate files. For one address, the free email checker does five checks a minute with no account. At larger companies expect more risky results: security gateways and catch-all domains can't always be confirmed, which is another reason to keep the per-company cap low. See verify emails behind security gateways.

The order is: filter, limit, verify, send.

The legal angle is the same rule

This is not legal advice; if you're unsure, ask a lawyer.

• UK and EU. A named work address is personal data. The usual basis for B2B cold email is legitimate interests, and relevance is a big part of that test: is the message about something the person's job actually covers? Picking the right person isn't just better sales; it's what makes the email defensible. You must also tell them where you got their details, at the latest in your first email. Some countries, Germany among them, generally require consent for marketing email even to businesses. See GDPR for B2B cold email and PECR and UK cold email.
• US (CAN-SPAM). No exception for B2B. Honest headers and subject lines, your physical postal address and a working opt-out honoured within 10 business days. See CAN-SPAM for cold email.
• Everywhere. Use public business information only, respect each site's and job board's terms, and keep the source URL and date for every contact.

What checking costs

The seniority filter, the per-company limit and the role-address filter are free and run in your browser. To verify whole lists every month:

• Starter, $9 a month: 2,500 checks.
• Pro, $39 a month: Unlimited email verification.*
• Business, $99 a month: the first 300,000 checks a month at full speed, 5 seats.
• Agency, $249 a month: the first 750,000 checks a month at full speed, 15 seats, client workspaces.

*Pro fair use: the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off. See pricing.

More reading: how to find a CEO's email, how to find someone's business email, cold email for enterprise companies.