Nothing beats having a lead’s email for your sales team, which is probably why most people treat them as secrets that need more protection than gold.

And LinkedIn truly is the Fort Knox of that B2B contact information you want.

There are more than 467 million users on LinkedIn right now, ranging from top leaders in the c-suite and small business owners to procurement managers and entry-level developers.

It’s one of the best places for you to find the right lead on a platform where they engage and try to make themselves known — LinkedIn says that 40% of its users check in daily.

So, it makes perfect sense that your business (and ours) relies on LinkedIn for prospecting and generating qualified leads to keep the lights on.

The big downside here is that LinkedIn’s InMail isn’t always the best place to establish a connection or send a sales pitch.

Some people views this as more of a personal connection than a company one, so you can reach out but it needs to be a soft touch.

It’s the perfect place to identifying who would be receptive to a sales pitch at their work, but it’s often not easy to find their work email —directly asking for it can get a lot of doors closed in your face.

But don’t worry, we’ve put together a list of tools and techniques that can help you find the work email, phone, and other information on your top LinkedIn prospects, all with minimal fuss and effort.

Tool #1: Hunter Takes Aim and Mostly Hits Its Target

How It Runs

Few things are simpler and more effective than Hunter, a handy tool and Chrome extension that can help you find and verify email addresses from companies all around the web, with a special focus on LinkedIn.

By pairing an incredibly large database of company email domains and known addresses — from verified individual accounts to “info” and “help” addresses — Hunter applies pattern recognition to your lead’s information to build out the most likely email addresses and then verifies them for deliverability.

The best news of all is that you can start with a free account that lets you perform up to 150 free searches each month.

Using Hunter for LinkedIn Connections

So, to find your LinkedIn connections’ emails with Hunter you’ve got to take a few steps.

1. Create an account and install the free Chrome extension.
2. Navigate to the lead’s LinkedIn page.
3. Click the bright orange “Hunter” button
4. Review the results.
5. With a paid account, you can also export your entire lead list through the “My leads” link.

And boom, you’re ready to contact your lead at an email address that tends to have a very high confidence rating.

The Hunter Caveat: Search Preferences

Hunter does show a preference for the companies you’ve already searched, so it’s an excellent idea to do a minute of research and find the domain of your prospect’s company. For example, when I searched myself, it initially provided my email address as [email protected][company1] because I had just used Hunter to find an email address of one of my prospects at [company1].

Now, I’m sure their Mark is a good guy — with a name like Mark you can’t go wrong — but he definitely isn’t me.

Hunter gives us a good teachable moment: always do your homework and take a second to double-check your answers.

Tool #2: Contactout Is Simple and Ever-present

How It Runs

Contactout is a simple and effective browser extension that tends to deliver multiple email addresses for contacts, providing a mix of professional and personal emails. You’ll be up and running in just a few moments, and there’s a painless way to save profiles and export them when you connect the service to your Google Sheets account.

The upside is that it is powerful and very successful in the tests we ran for this post. You also will get a large number of credits for free use when you first sign-up, so you may not need to make a purchase for your first round of prospecting.

The downside is that sometimes you get too much information for the purposes of prospecting. Bulk import functionality isn’t available, and the Google Sheets import includes a significant amount of profile data for your contacts, which can make it hard to dig through without additional work.

Understanding Connections with Contactout

So, to find your LinkedIn connections’ emails with Hunter you’ve got to take a few steps.

1. Create an account and install the free Chrome extension.
2. Navigate to the lead’s LinkedIn page.
3. Click the white arrow on the black background that appears in the top-right corner of your browser.
4. If the prospect already provides an email, it will appear. If not, click “Find emails.”
5. Verify the contact’s name and the domain you want to search, then click “Find work email.”
6. Review the results.
7. Click “Save profile” to export this to a Google Sheets document.

In just a few steps you’re ready to reach out to your prospect. Connecting your Google Drive account is definitely worth the effort because it makes building your prospect list that much quicker.

While the company’s slogan says you can find anyone’s email and phone number, it returns phone numbers for very few candidates.

The Contactout Caveat: Always On

One thing to note about Contactout is that it starts off as a Chrome extension, but then immediately switches to being a program that always runs in the background of your computer. Once added, you’ll see a notification that says the program initiates at startup and will continue to run in the background even when Chrome is closed.

The extension also asks for permission to read and change all data on the websites you visit. While the developer team is good about responding to bugs, they haven’t clarified what this means.

Nothing seems nefarious, but it may raise some privacy concerns for you or your IT team.

 

Tool #3: SellHack for Bigger Players

More Power, Fewer Freebies

Rounding out our list is SellHack, which makes the cut because of its ability to integrate with a variety of other systems. While we’re big fans of Infusionsoft, if you rely on Salesforce you can integrate your prospecting directly into your CRM to build a number of additional contact points and options.

SellHack offers a free trial that gives you up to 10 free emails each month using its Chrome plugin or the prospect list builder tool. If you want to jump up to 150 emails (roughly equivalent to the free Hunter level), it will run you $19 per month.

This doesn’t qualify for our caveat section, but it is worth noting right away if you’re going to be testing out multiple options to find what is best for your team.

Manual and Automatic Email Discovery with SellHack

Getting started with the free version of SellHack is easy, but there are more manual steps compared to the others on our list. However, paid accounts have a Prospecting Mode that automates a lot of the copying and pasting described below.

So, let’s dive in:

1. Create an account and install the free Chrome extension (yes, there is quite a pattern here).
2. Navigate to your lead’s LinkedIn page.
3. Click the SellHack extension icon next to your navigation bar.
4. Copy your lead’s name and paste it in the “Name” bar in the SellHack drop-down menu.
5. Do the same thing for the company name and provide the company’s URL in the email domain you’re searching.
6. Click “Run Search” and get your results.
7. If you’re happy with what you see — and the company provides a confidence rating as well — you can choose among your prospect lists to add the information to with just one click.
8. Lists can be managed within the service’s dashboard or through the other systems you have integrated with it.

 

 

 

The SellHack Caveat: Scales Up Quickly

If you have a large team and a decent budget, SellHack can be a significantly strong tool. To make the most of it, you’ll probably want to move to a higher tier subscription so you can have the credits and prospect searches available when you need it.

As you spend more, you also gain more integration options and better plugins. The basic plugin is perfect if you want to add a single profile at a time, while the other options make it quicker to add a variety of targets and automatically add them to your lists.

You’ll get access to bulk email verification tools as well, which is good for those lead lists you’ve bought and are trying to verify. Email verification tools appear to perform well with incomplete data files, helping to fill in some gaps while also providing data accuracy and validation checks.

To make the most of it, you’ll need a decent sized team and need to be looking for a substantial number of prospects each day. If you’ve got a sales department with members who are solely devoted to finding prospects and passing along those they can qualify, you’ve found a good partner.

Ultimate Thoughts on Finding Who You Need with LinkedIn

Prospecting on LinkedIn is like working out at the gym. You’ll need to have the form down right and to do a lot of work yourself, but there are machines that can help based on your fitness level and what you’re trying to accomplish.

But, these machines won’t do you any good unless you’ve got a regimen you can stick to and are keeping up each day.

These are three of our favorite tools for getting the information you need to turn prospects into new deals and lucrative clients. They’re a top bet for figuring out how to reach people in a way they are receptive to — some research says you could see interaction rates of 40% to 60% higher compared to just reaching out via InMail.

So, make sure your daily workout plan is doable, grab the right equipment for your business fitness goals, and get to it!