You’ve done the research. You know exactly who you want to reach, the right title, the right company, the right person. Now you’re staring at a blank screen wondering how on earth you’re actually going to get a hold of them.
Sound familiar? It happens to salespeople, recruiters, freelancers, and small business owners every single day. You find the perfect contact on LinkedIn, and then… nothing. No phone number. No email. Just a profile picture and a vague list of job responsibilities.
The good news? Getting verified contact information isn’t nearly as mysterious as it used to be. There are smarter ways to do it. And you don’t need to spend three hours playing detective to make it work.
Why Contact Information Is So Hard to Find
Here’s the thing: most professionals don’t broadcast their direct contact details publicly. That’s intentional. If your phone number and email were plastered all over the internet, you’d be drowning in spam before lunch.
So instead, companies keep that information relatively locked down. You might find a generic contact@company.com on a website, or a customer service line that routes you through three menus before you get to a real person. Neither of those are going to help when you need to reach a specific VP of Marketing at a mid-sized company in Chicago.
This is the bottleneck most sales reps and recruiters hit. They know who they want to talk to. They just can’t figure out how.
The Guessing Game That Wastes Everyone’s Time
If you’ve ever tried to cold email someone without knowing their exact address, you probably did what most people do: guess. You know their name, you know the company domain, so you try firstname.lastname@company.com and hope for the best.
Sometimes that works. A lot of the time, it doesn’t, and a bounced email isn’t just frustrating, it’s actually damaging. Email providers track your bounce rate. Too many undelivered messages and your domain starts getting flagged as spam, which means even your valid emails stop landing in inboxes.
Guessing phone numbers isn’t even an option. You either have it or you don’t. And calling a switchboard to ask for someone’s direct line is, let’s be honest, a 2005 approach that rarely goes anywhere.
There has to be a better way. There is.
How Email Format Intelligence Actually Works
One of the most underrated tricks in B2B outreach is figuring out a company’s standard email format before you start building your list.
Most companies use one consistent pattern for all employee emails, firstname.lastname, first.last, flast, or some variation. Once you know the pattern, you can apply it across your entire list with confidence instead of firing off guesses and hoping something sticks.
For example, if you look up the email pattern for a major firm and find that the format is jane_d@deloitte.com, you immediately know the structure for every employee at that organization. No more guessing. No more bounces. You just build your list and go.
This kind of format intelligence is especially useful when you’re doing account-based outreach, targeting multiple people at the same company. Nail the format once, apply it everywhere.
Finding Direct Phone Numbers (Yes, Real Ones)
Email is great, but sometimes a phone call is what moves things forward. The challenge is that most contact databases are packed with main office lines and switchboard numbers that go absolutely nowhere.
What you actually need is a direct dial, the number that rings the person’s desk or mobile, not a receptionist who’s never heard of them.
That’s a harder nut to crack, but it’s possible. The trick is using tools specifically designed for phone-based prospecting rather than treating phone numbers as an afterthought. A dedicated SignalHire phone number finder pulls direct dials and mobile numbers from verified databases, including DNC checking so you’re not calling people who’ve opted out of solicitation.
Direct dial rates matter more than most people realize. Studies consistently show that calls to direct lines connect at significantly higher rates than calls to general company numbers. If you’re doing any volume of phone outreach, that difference adds up fast.
What Tools Actually Help
Not all contact data tools are built equal, and most salespeople figure that out the hard way after bouncing dozens of emails from a list they paid good money for.
The tools worth your time share a few characteristics: they verify data in real time rather than relying on static databases, they cover both email and phone, and they’re built with compliance in mind, meaning the data comes from legitimate public sources and respects opt-out requests.
Chrome extensions that work directly on LinkedIn profiles are particularly handy for prospectors who spend a lot of time browsing the platform. Instead of jumping between tabs and manually tracking down information, you can surface contact details right alongside the profile you’re already looking at.
Bulk enrichment is the other big time-saver. If you’re working from a list of names and companies, you can upload the whole thing and get it back with verified contact information filled in, rather than running each name individually.
Tips to Make Your Outreach Land
Getting the right contact information is step one. Step two is making sure what you send actually gets a response.
A few things that consistently make a difference: personalize beyond just the name, mention something specific about their company or role that shows you’ve done more than run a search. Keep your opening line short, because nobody has time for a long setup before you get to the point. And be upfront about why you’re reaching out rather than burying the ask at the end of a long paragraph.
Timing matters too. Emails sent Tuesday through Thursday mornings tend to see better open rates than Monday mornings (when inboxes are overwhelming) or Friday afternoons (when everyone’s mentally checked out for the weekend). For phone calls, late morning and late afternoon tend to catch people between meetings.
One more thing: follow up. Most responses come on the second or third touch, not the first. A single email that doesn’t get a reply isn’t a rejection, it’s often just timing.
The Bottom Line
Finding accurate business contact information used to be a grind. It still takes effort, but the tools available today make it a lot less painful than it was even a few years ago.
The biggest shift is moving away from guessing and toward verified data, knowing the email format before you build your list, having direct phone numbers instead of switchboard lines, and using tools that keep information current rather than selling you stale contacts from three years ago.
If you’re doing any kind of B2B outreach, whether that’s sales, recruiting, or partnership development, that foundation of clean contact data is what everything else is built on. Get that right, and the rest of the process gets a whole lot smoother.
