- Start with a verified database — the other eight methods are for the gaps.
- Company email patterns are predictable; guess the pattern, then verify it.
- Never send to an unverified address: bounces damage your domain for months.
You've found the perfect prospect — right role, right company, right timing — and you have no way to reach them. Finding a business email address is one of the most common problems in B2B sales, and it has more solutions than most people realize. Here are nine, roughly in order of how quickly they work.
1. Search a verified lead database
The fastest path by a wide margin. Modern B2B databases hold hundreds of millions of verified business contacts, searchable by role, company, industry, and geography. Instead of hunting one email, you filter for the hundred people who match your ideal customer and export them already verified. BixJet's Lead Finder searches 275M+ contacts and the whole of LinkedIn this way, with verification built in before anything enters a sequence.
2. Use an email finder on a name and domain
Have the person's name and their company website? An email finder resolves the pair into a verified address in seconds by combining known patterns with live validation. This is the workhorse method for one-off lookups and the one most sales teams use dozens of times a day.
3. Work out the company's email pattern
Most companies use one consistent format. Find any employee's email — a press contact, a support address, a signature in a PDF — and you've usually cracked the pattern for everyone:
- first.last@company.com — by far the most common in B2B
- firstinitiallast@company.com (jsmith@)
- first@company.com — typical at startups
- firstlast@company.com and first_last@company.com
Apply the pattern to your target's name, then verify before sending. Guessing is only half the method; verification is what makes it safe.
4. Mine their LinkedIn profile
People list contact details in more places than they remember: the contact-info panel, the About section, a post announcing a new role, or a link in the featured section. If you're connected, LinkedIn often exposes the email directly. Even without it, the profile gives you the exact name spelling and current employer that every other method depends on.
5. Google with search operators
Targeted queries surface addresses that live in public documents, conference listings, and press pages. Try "firstname lastname" + "@company.com", or site:company.com "email", or the person's name alongside "contact" and their city. Press releases and academic or conference PDFs are unusually rich sources.
6. Check the company website properly
Team pages, press kits, investor pages, and careers pages routinely list direct addresses. So do the footers of blog posts written by the person you're targeting. It takes ninety seconds and works more often than its reputation suggests.
7. Look at X/Twitter, GitHub, and personal sites
Developers and founders in particular leave working addresses in GitHub commit histories, personal portfolio sites, and bio links. If your prospect is technical, check GitHub before anything else.
8. Try a WHOIS lookup
For smaller companies where your prospect may be the domain owner, WHOIS records sometimes still expose a registrant email. Privacy protection has made this less reliable than it once was, but it costs seconds and occasionally hands you a founder's direct address.
9. Just ask — on another channel
The most underrated method. A short LinkedIn message — "Working on something I think is relevant to your team, what's the best email for you?" — has a surprisingly high hit rate, and it starts the relationship with permission rather than a cold guess. This works especially well when you already have a warm signal.
Verify before you send. Every time.
Whichever method you use, verification is not optional. Hard bounces above 2–3% damage your sender reputation for months, and a damaged domain quietly sends every future campaign to spam. Verify at the moment of sending, not just at list-build time, because addresses die between the two. See our guide to email verification and deliverability for the full picture.