How to find the email of anyone (The “I Will Find You” technique)

The “I Will Find You” Technique (sorry maybe I need to work on the name of this technique). Whatever the name, it works!

This is a tip to help you find the email address of someone you cannot connect with on Linkedin (not premium or out of network, etc.). I not longer use Linkedin In-mail to reach out to people. Some of you may already know how to do this, but if this helps just one person it will be worth it.

First, you need to find their first and last name as well as current company (easy, Linkedin).

Next, you need to determine the format of the email address their company uses.

How do you determine that?
Do a Google search as follows: “email * * company.com” (include quotation marks). This search will bring up results with the Company’s email addresses. Scroll through the results and find a pattern within the email addresses (i.e. john.doe@company.com and jane.doe@company.com). This site also helps find the email pattern.

BOOM! Now you know their email and can connect!

Most companies use some combination such as:
john.doe@company.com
john_doe@company.com
jdoe@companyx.com

If you cannot find a pattern then just try emailing the person with many possibilities (i.e. send the email to jdoe@companyx.com but include the other email address patterns in the BCC).

Questions:
1. What have you found successful when reaching out to people?
2. What obstacles have you encountered?

Good Luck!
-Matthew

Bonus Tip: If you are struggling to find more people to network with sign up for meetup.com and find a local meetup for your field and view the members of that meetup. Chances are those members are on Linkedin (aka find their company) and you can use the “I Will Find You” technique.