The moment comes up constantly. You are reading a company's site, you can see they need what you sell, and you do not know who to write to. The "Contact us" form goes to a shared inbox. A guess at the CEO's email bounces. The usual fix is to stop, open another tab, run a lookup, copy a name into a spreadsheet and come back. By then you have lost the thread. This guide covers how to decide who to contact, and how to do it without leaving the page.
Start with who owns the problem
Before any tool, decide what kind of person you want. It depends on the size of the company and what you sell.
- Under 15 people: the founder or owner. They make every buying decision, and their name is usually on the About page.
- 15 to 100: the head of the function your product touches. Selling scheduling software to a clinic group means the operations lead. Selling ad management means whoever runs marketing.
- Over 100: a manager close to the work, not the executive. A director of the team that feels the problem is easier to reach and has more reason to answer than a C-level who gets a lot of messages. For more on this, see how to find decision makers at a company.
If you are early and unsure, write to the founder anyway. They can forward it, and being sent to the right person by a founder is the best introduction there is. Who to talk to first at a startup goes through the choice in more detail.
What the site itself tells you
A company's own website holds more names than most people read. Check four places, in this order.
- About or Team page. Names, titles and sometimes photos. This settles the question for small companies.
- Blog and press posts. The author line on a post about the exact topic you sell into is a strong hint. The author line is a hint, not proof, since it is often a marketer or the founder.
- Job listings. A careers page shows the roles they are filling, sometimes who they report to, and a job post for a role in your area is a reason to write.
- Footer, legal and contact pages. Registered names, support emails and sometimes a named contact.
This works, and it is slow: five to ten minutes a company if you do it properly. Do that for 25 companies and you have spent a morning on lookups.
Doing it from the page with the Rocketship Chrome extension
The free Rocketship extension for Chrome does the lookup where you already are. On any company's website, you click the Rocketship button and it shows who to contact there. You can switch between owners and founders, sales, marketing, or everyone, tick the people you want, and add them to Rocketship. Looking is free. Finding an email uses leads, 2 for each email found, the same as in the app.
A few practical points:
- It works from the company's own domain, so it does not matter how you reached the site: a Google result, a directory, a LinkedIn post.
- You choose who goes in. Tick two people at a small company, a founder and the person who runs the relevant function, and skip the rest.
- Everything you add lands in your Rocketship workspace as a person you can research, email and track, with no spreadsheet in between.
- You sign in once.
The extension saves the tab-switching, and it has limits. It finds people the data can see, so a business with almost no online footprint will show little. In that case the About page is still the best source, and the guide above applies.
From LinkedIn profiles too
Version 1.1.0 of the extension also adds a person from a LinkedIn profile. When you are viewing a profile, you click the button, and the extension reads that one profile (name, headline, current company and location), shows the person, and gives you two choices: add them to Rocketship for free, or add them and look for an email. LinkedIn's terms limit scraping with browser plugins, so read them before you use any tool on the site. The extension reads only the profile you are on, at the moment you click, and it does not open other profiles, click through LinkedIn or send messages. If Chrome will not let it read the tab, it asks for a permission first. That is the quick route for a person you spotted in a post or comment. If you would rather do this by hand, how to find an email address from a LinkedIn profile covers it.
Write something worth opening
The email still has to give them a reason to answer. Use what you learned on the site. If a recent blog post is about onboarding delays, open with that. If a job post says they are hiring their first salesperson, say you can start filling a pipeline before that hire arrives. A line that could only have been written to this company shows you did the research. For what comes next, see how to get meetings with decision makers.
A five-minute test
Pick five companies you would really like as customers. For each, find one person to write to, first by hand using the four places above and again with the extension. Time both. If the extension saves you four minutes a company, 25 companies a week is more than an hour and a half back, and you will know if it is worth installing.
The extension is free in the Chrome Web Store. It adds people to a Rocketship workspace, so you need an account, and the 7-day trial is the way to try it.