Decide which role buys what you sell
The decision maker is the person who owns the problem you solve and the budget to fix it. That depends on company size more than on job titles.
| Company size | Who usually decides | Who else is involved |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 10 people | The founder or owner | Often nobody else |
| 11 to 50 people | The founder, or the head of the team that feels the problem | Whoever will use the product daily |
| 51 to 250 people | The head of the department (sales, operations, marketing, IT) | Finance for budget, IT for security review |
| 250 or more | A director or VP who owns the budget | A buying group: users, IT, procurement, legal |
Write one line before you search: "I sell X, which fixes Y, so the person who loses sleep over Y is Z." If you sell a scheduling tool to clinics, Z is the practice manager, not the chief medical officer.
For larger companies, email the person who owns the problem, not the most senior title. A head of sales operations answers more cold email about CRM tooling than a chief revenue officer, and can bring the right people in.
Find the name
Public sources, roughly in the order worth trying:
- The company's team or leadership page. Small companies list everyone; larger ones list the leadership team.
- LinkedIn. Search the company's people tab for the role keyword ("operations", "procurement", "IT"). Filter by current company, not past.
- The company register. Directors of private companies are public in many countries. Companies House covers the UK, OpenCorporates links registers worldwide, and German companies list their managing director (Geschäftsführer) in the imprint.
- Job ads. A posting for "SDR, reporting to the Head of Sales" names the team lead you are looking for, and tells you the team is growing.
- Press releases and news. Funding, hiring and partnership announcements quote the people in charge.
- Conference and podcast pages. Speakers list their current title, often more precisely than LinkedIn.
- Annual reports and filings. Public companies name their executives; in the US, SEC EDGAR has the filings.
Check they still hold the job
People change jobs often enough that a list built six months ago has stale names. Before you write:
- Confirm the current title on LinkedIn or the company site, and look at the start date.
- If the role has a new person in it, email them instead. A new head of department is often reviewing tools and suppliers.
- If two people share the responsibility, pick the one closest to the problem and mention the other by role, not by name.
Mistakes that waste lookups
- Always aiming for the CEO. In companies above about 50 people the chief executive rarely buys tools for a single team and often forwards cold email to an assistant who deletes it.
- Trusting old lists. A purchased or year-old list has people who have changed jobs. Check before you spend a lookup on them.
- Guessing from the title alone. "Head of Growth" means marketing at one company and sales at another. Read the person's description or recent posts before you decide they own your problem.
- Emailing several people at once. Writing to four people in the same team on the same day looks like a blast. Start with one, and mention a colleague only if they do not reply.
- Skipping the customer check. Cold-emailing a company that is already a customer, or in an active deal with your team, is embarrassing and avoidable.
Build a short list, then go deep
Ten well-researched prospects where you know the right person, their current role and one reason to write today will produce more conversations than two hundred names pulled by job title. Start with the companies that best fit your offer, find the decision maker at each, and only widen the list once you know which roles reply.
Get a verified email
With the name and company domain, find and verify the address. Our guide on how to find someone's email address covers email patterns, how verification works and what an accept-all result means. Do not send to an address that came back invalid, and send accept-all addresses in small numbers.
Write to the person, not the title
What you learned while finding them is the best material for the first line of your email: the job ad they posted, the talk they gave, the region they just expanded into. One specific line about their situation and one sentence about the problem you solve beats a paragraph about your product.
If you are not sure you have the right person, ask in one line: "If this sits with someone else on your team, who should I speak to?" A forwarded email from inside the company carries more weight than a cold one.
Then plan the follow-ups before you send the first email. See how to write cold email follow-ups.
Doing this in Reach-book.com
Start from a list of target companies: the lead finder searches by company, name, role or LinkedIn profile. Each prospect gets company website research, the email lookup returns a verified status, and the AI email writer drafts a first email from the research, which you review and approve. The customer check flags anyone who already has a relationship with your company.