Business Development Guide:

Contact Search
Introduction to Business Development
This training resource aims to provide instructions, resources, and guides to help you be
prepared for a general business development role, more specifically, the perform the contact
search function that is often required in a role like this.

As quoted by Forbes magazine, “Business development is the creation of long-term value for an
organization from customers, markets, and relationships.” But before you can have a long-term
value, you have to have a beginning -- you have to start something. This is where contact
search starts, and is an important part of the business development process. In fact, you can’t
do business development without it. In one way or another, all business professionals do some
form of contact search when they begin a company or want to promote an idea or product.

Generally speaking, in contact search you are responsible for identifying, selecting, and marking
entities and their respective reference information who will be targeted for a specific purpose.

What is contact search?

Contact Search is the beginning of the business development process. Most of the process to
build contact lists can be done anywhere as you, at a minimum, need an internet connection
and a computer. Often times, there are little to no resources or information provided when a
person begins a contact search process. Depending on the company and the project, you may
be given a template as to what to find, where to find it and where to put the information.

As you begin searching for contacts and information some of the information will be quite easy
to find. There are businesses, companies, and people with robust internet and social media
presences; these contacts are easy to identify and collect. Other times, no matter how hard you
try, you may be unable to find the contacts of certain company or individual.

When you’re searching and spending time on this process, use your best judgement as to how
long to look for one piece of contact information. If you spend more than 5 minutes trying to
obtain an individual’s contact, it is probably better to move on to a different employee and try to
obtain their contact instead. However, if it turns out that you are unable to obtain any
employee-specific contacts from the particular company at all, obtaining a company’s general
information would be a good alternative.

In the end, if you’ve exhausted all means to find a contact, it is best to move on and work on
contacts for another company or individual. After all, you may be searching for many contacts
on a daily basis, so being unable to find one piece of contact information for one company or
individual is usually not a major issue.

How to begin the contact search process

While engaging with the contact search process, your searching will generally begin with one of
three categories:
1. General Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing!)
2. Social Media (FB, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn)
3. Industry-Specific platforms (Soundcloud for musicians)

Contact search with general search engines

Occasionally you may have broad search criteria that force you to look on general search
engines, or because the information you are looking for cannot be found using the Social Media
or Industry Specific platforms, or you may do this because you want to make sure that the
stakeholder exists. In that case, to obtain contact information, you would have to go through a
stakeholder’s website and search for their contact information. Typically, you will be able to find
the contact information within a company’s website in the “About Us” or “Get to Know the Team”
sections and the like. You would be able to find such sections either on top of their website or at
the bottom.

Some examples of general search engines include Yahoo, Google and Bing. These search
engines are going to be relevant to you as they are one of the most well-developed search tools
because of their access to large amounts of data for your search.
The following is an example of a way general search engines are used. The criteria in the
example is finding “mutual funds in California.” You could try this yourself by typing “mutual
funds in California” into a Google search and look at the results.

Out of all the choices here, you have selected BlackRock, which is highlighted in the blue
rectangle.

After clicking the BlackRock tab, you will be presented a set of websites. Go ahead and select
BlackRock’s official website: “www.blackrock.com/”
It will lead you to the following home page.

Once you are in BlackRock’s home page, scroll down to the bottom and search for Contact us,
as shown in a blue rectangle, from the bottom of the page.

Lastly, you’d be able to find the company’s contact information as highlighted below and record
the highlighted email in your spreadsheet.

Contact search with social media

At times, you may have to search for individual professional contact information, so you would
want to use LinkedIn. In this case, you need to be clear with the parameters of the search. You
may be asked to search for contacts with specific criteria. For example: “find senior-level
recruiters in Fortune 500 companies based in California & New York” or “find CEOs, CFOs, and
Venture Partners from Mutual Funds or Family Offices based in the United States.”
After receiving the criteria, you may need to conduct an additional search to help yourself be
more prepared for the task. Asking yourself important questions such as, “where do I find X & Y
information to support me” would greatly help you. For instance, with reference to the Google
search example above, you may need to search for Fortune 500’s websites and apply the
relevant filters to identify what Fortune 500 companies are in California & New York.

Next, you’ll need to identify the people who are at the companies who fit the criteria you’re
searching for. On LinkedIn, you have to open the “People” section first before applying the
relevant filters and identifying the right individuals to collect emails from.

After opening an individual’s LinkedIn page, use the tools to obtain the individual’s email.
Occasionally the software may be bugged and not display the right email for the right individual
(you can tell that a bug occurred since the extension may show a different profile). Simply
refresh the tool you are using or the page, and you should be able to obtain the right email for
the person.

Example criteria:
Search for Paragon One Employee Email

Step 1: utilize a general search engine to help you narrow down the criteria quickly
Step 2: Opening the link will lead you to Paragon One’s LinkedIn page as shown below. To find
the contacts of their employees. Open the “People” tabas highlighted below

Step 3: Identifying the right people in the company using LinkedIn. You can use filters to identify
the right kind of employee you are looking for.

Example: seeking Paragon One employees with filter set to “recruiting”

Step 4: Click an employee’s profile that matches the criteria

Step 5: use tools from your browser extensions to obtain an individual’s email

The LeadLeaper and SalesQL email finder tools

Utilizing LeadLeaper to identify a contact’s email, redacted here.

How to get emails off Linkedin using tools
Installing several extensions are often required to do the task efficiently. The tools could greatly
help in your efforts to find a stakeholder’s contact information.

Here are a few tools that are proficient in obtaining contact information on LinkedIn:
1. LeadLeaper
2. SalesQL
3. Skrapp
4. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The tools are ordered from the most reliable to the least reliable. If the first tool does not work,
use the second tool and so forth.

Contact search with an industry-specific platform

Occasionally you need searches done in a specific industry. The first thing you’ll want to do to
identify what type of platform might be a relevant industry-specific search engine for you to
perform your contact search process. Because there are so many different combinations of this,
and also because you may think a market is already saturated in, you will want to find new and
different platforms to search. Start this process by doing a general search for key words in the
industry along with what type of information you’re looking for. Here are examples of how you
might locate a new website, platform, or search engine that is a relevant match for the type of
information you’re looking for.

● Professional Development Book + Retailers

● Used Car Sales Company Directories
● Wholesale Guitar Distributors
● Real Estate Agency Names
● Insurance Claim Lawyers + Contact Information
● Music Platforms for Upcoming Artists

The example below is about searching for up-and-coming artists, see below:
You can see that we searched for “Music Platforms for Upcoming Artists” and a number of
different platforms appeared. Let’s use Soundcloud as the example moving forward.

Depending on what you are looking for, each industry has a specialized website to help you find
the information you need.

When you search on a website you’ll want to immediately evaluate it for where easy-to-find
contact information might be. Often times, like here on Soundcloud, people or companies will
have a profile and you can search for information on their “About” or “Contact” page. Keep in
mind that you might just need to click on their profile name once more to find additional
information. See the example below where there is not only easy-to-find information linked to
social media and a website, but there is also an “email” icon.

Consider that websites have a number of ways, with symbols and written language, to represent
where you may be able to find contact information.